Dr. Jiao received the 2026 Saint Louis Section ACS Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to chemistry and demonstrated potential to further advance the profession. The award highlights our electrochemical flow reactors that greatly improve the conversion of CO2 and CO into value added chemicals.

We show that copper based CO electrolyzers degrade rapidly under intermittent power, and that a controlled power down strategy keeping the cathode at a protective potential solves this problem, enabling more than 750 hours of stable operation and up to 26% lower multicarbon product costs. The results have been published in Nature Catalysis and featured by WashU McKelvey Engineering.

In a Comment in Nature Chemical Engineering, we argue that CO and CO2 electrolysis research must move beyond lab scale cells and tackle the engineering challenges of pilot scale stacks, including heat management, pressure and fluid flow. 

We reported an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven multi-scale simulation framework integrating grand-canonical density functional theory (GC-DFT), microkinetic modeling (MKM), and active learning to elucidate the CORR mechanism and guide catalyst discovery. The results have been published in Nature Communications. This is a collaborative work with Dr. Che at WPI. 

In a recent study, we show that low-cost diaphragm materials, such as Zirfon, can serve as robust alternatives to AEMs in alkaline CO electrolysis. We evaluate a range of diaphragms and identify candidates that match or exceed the performance of commercial AEMs across a wide range of operating conditions. The results have been published in Nature Communications.