Our lab moved to the Energy, Environmental, & Chemical Engineering Department in the Washington University in St. Louis. We have a few immediate postdoc openings in the field of catalysis. We are looking for candidates with strong background in thermochemical or electrochemical reactor engineering, and CFD modeling. If interested, please send your CV to jiaof@wustl.edu.

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).

In a recent issue of Science, our work on corps grown without sunlight was highlighted  by Robert F. Service. The feature article discussed the innovation by Drs. Jinkerson and Jiao, to grow corps in dark with an acetate solution produced through an electrocatalytic CO2 reduction process. The full article can be found [here].

Together with team members from University of California Riverside, we (Team Nolux) won the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge Phase 2 Award! We proposed an artificial photosynthetic pathway to produce foods from CO2, H2O, and electricity, which has the potential to support NASA's manned deep space missions. The news announcement can be found [here]. 

Together with Dr. Seger and Dr. Robert, we discussed the issues faced when reporting performance of CO2 electrolysis technology and recommend how to move forward at both materials and device levels. The article has been published in Nature Sustainability. [Link to full article]

The ability of understanding the performance at a full device level is critical to rationally design new generation CO2 electrolyzer systems. In the Jiao lab, we developed a 5-electrode technique that is able to probe the resistance across different interfaces in a CO2 electrolyzer at work. With the new diagnostic tool, a record performance for CO2 electroreduction to CO was achieved. The key results were published in ACS Energy Letters. 

We recently introduce a new strategy to improve acetate selectivity in CO electrolysis. The combination of a Ni-Fe anode catalyst and a suitable anion exchange membrane enabled us to produce a highly concentrated acetate product stream with a high purity (>95%). This work represents a critical step towards commercial applications. The key results were published in Nature Catalysis.