Washington University in St. Louis received the first NSF Engineering Research Center grant in its its history! With a total of $26 million research fund from NSF, CURB will focus on combining electrocatalysis with biological systems to create new routes for sustainable biomanufacturing. Dr. Jiao will serve as the associate director for convergent research.

As one of the four teams competing in the final phase of the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge (Phase 3), NoLux won the runner up and a cash prize of $250,000. The Jiao Lab worked closely with other team members at the University of California Riverside over the two years, successfully turning a concept into a fully working prototype. The prototype has been operated for two months by students from Ohio State University and produced mushrooms from CO2-derived acetate.   

The conversion of CO2 into valuable chemicals is a key strategy for carbon utilization. Although tandem CO2 electrolysis has shown promise, it has been largely confined to watt-scale studies and larger-scale studies are needed to accelerate commercialization. In a recent effort, the Jiao lab demonstrated a tandem CO2 electrolyzer engineered for the production of multicarbon products, acetate and ethylene, at the kilowatt (kW) scale. The results have been published in Nature Chemical Engineering. [link]

Dr. Jiao and his co-workers have been granted a new US patent on the CO2/CO electrolysis technology.

Thanks to our lovely hard-working students and postdocs. This is an achievement by all current and past members of the Jiao group.

We are thrilling to part of a new consortium, where we will work with companies and university researchers to create a sustainable source of proteins for human food derived from CO2. The aim is to help fight the rising global problems with food insecurity and greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture. the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation are supporting the initiative with up to DKK 200 million (€27 million).