The depletion of natural resources, rising fuel costs, and increasingly stringent environmental regulations have created a need for new and diverse forms of energy. Heterogeneous catalysis has played and will continue to play an important role both in the generation and use of energy to ensure a sustainable future, but a number of open questions remain to exploit the full potential of such catalytic systems. In order to do this, one needs not only to understand, but also to control materials at the nanometer length scale and far away from thermodynamic equilibrium.
In my research group, we model such systems from an atomistic (using ab initio quantum chemistry tools) and macroscopic (using Monte Carlo and Transfer Matrix methods) point of view. We also link these methods with corresponding multi-scale models. Our work is done in close collaboration with experimentalists. Some areas of interest to me are listed below.
Heterogeneous Catalysis in High Electric Fields
Theory of Surface Processes
