Abstract:
I will discuss historical links between chemical engineering, chemistry, energy systems, and environmental sustainability. I will outline the transformative potential of chemical engineering in the design of sustainable energy systems and the key limitations preventing us from taking full advantage of this potential. I will describe some promising directions, focusing on specific avenues that we have been exploring.
In this context, I will discuss our recent work on developing multifunctional catalytic materials that allow us to make chemical conversion processes more selective and efficient. I will focus on a few reactions that have dramatic environmental impact, including solar water splitting, upgrading shale gas component into useful chemicals and fuels, developing alloy electrocatalysts for fuel cell applications, and some others.

Biography:
Suljo Linic was born in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he completed his elementary and high school education. His family were forcefully displaced from Bosnia during the Bosnian war of 1990s. He moved to the USA in 1994 after being awarded a faculty scholarship from West Chester University (West Chester, PA). He completed his BS degree in Physics with minors in Mathematics and Chemistry at West Chester University (PA) in the spring of 1998. Suljo obtained his PhD degree in chemical engineering at University of Delaware, specializing in surface and colloidal chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis. He was a Max Planck postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Dr. Matthias Scheffler at the Fritz Haber Institute of Max Planck Society in Berlin (Germany), working on first principles studies of surface chemistry. He started his independent faculty career in 2004 at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he is currently Martin Lewis Perl Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering and the director of Energy Systems Engineering program. He was also a Hans Fischer Faculty Fellow from 2015 to 2019 at the Department of Chemistry at Technical University in Munich.
Suljo’s research has been recognized through multiple awards including the Gabor A. Somorjai Award by ACS, the Emmett Award by The North American Catalysis Society, the ACS Catalysis Lectureship for the Advancement of Catalytic Science awarded annually by the ACS Catalysis journal and Catalysis Science and Technology Division of ACS, the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award by American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the ACS Unilever Award awarded by the Colloids and Surface Science Division of ACS, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award awarded by the Dreyfus Foundation, the DuPont Young Professor Award, and a NSF Career Award. Suljo has presented more than 200 invited and keynote lectures, published more than 100 peer-reviewed paper in leading journal with over 25,000 citations. He serves as the associate editor of ACS catalysis journal.