People

Chemical Engineering

“Connecting Catalysis Across Interfaces and Energy Systems”

Jason Bates studies how heterogeneous catalysts work at a fundamental level and how that understanding can be used to design better chemical and energy technologies. His research focuses on bridging traditional thermal catalysis with emerging electrocatalysis, revealing common principles that govern reactions across solid surfaces, liquids, and electric fields. By combining precise materials synthesis with kinetic and spectroscopic tools, his group uncovers how the local environment around an active site — including electrolytes, electric fields, and confinement — controls reactivity and selectivity. His work aims to make catalytic systems more predictable by linking molecular-scale behavior to reaction performance. Bates’s research has been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, and he serves the catalysis community as Vice President of the Southeastern Catalysis Society.

Research Areas: Electrocatalysis, heterogeneous catalysis, chemical kinetics, surface characterization, molecularly defined catalysts

Civil and Environmental Engineering

“Connecting Laboratory Discoveries to Real-World Sustainability”

Lisa Colosi Peterson asks the questions that often go unasked in catalysis research: even if a new process works in the lab, is it actually better for the planet? Her work applies life cycle assessment and technoeconomic analysis to evaluate the environmental and economic consequences of emerging chemical technologies — before they reach industrial scale. This systems-level perspective is essential for ensuring that innovations in clean energy and sustainable chemistry translate into genuine environmental benefits rather than simply shifting burdens elsewhere. Within CICLEC, her role is to ground the group’s scientific creativity in quantitative sustainability metrics, providing a critical link between molecular discovery and societal impact.

Research Areas: Life cycle assessment (LCA), technoeconomic analysis (TEA), sustainable systems analysis, environmental impact modeling

Chemical Engineering

“Decades of Discovery at the Heart of Heterogeneous Catalysis”

Robert Davis has studied heterogeneous catalysis at UVA for more than three decades. His research is centered on understanding how the atomic structure of a catalyst — particularly at the interface between metal nanoparticles and their oxide supports — determines its performance in chemical reactions. Davis is renowned for his mastery of in-situ spectroscopic characterization, employing a comprehensive toolkit that includes synchrotron X-ray absorption, infrared and Raman spectroscopy, electron microscopy, and transient kinetic analysis to reveal how catalysts behave under working conditions. A recipient of the Emmett Award from the North American Catalysis Society and the Wilhelm Award of the AIChE, Davis has also co-authored a leading textbook on chemical reaction engineering.

Research Areas: Heterogeneous catalysis, supported metal nanoparticles, reaction kinetics, in-situ spectroscopy, metal-support interactions

Chemical Engineering

“Engineering Catalysts That Clean the Air We Breathe”

Bill Epling’s research sits at the intersection of fundamental catalysis science and reaction engineering. His group focuses on understanding reaction mechanisms at catalyst surfaces under realistic operating conditions, and on characterizing how catalysts degrade over time — a critically important but often underappreciated problem in practical catalysis. By coupling mechanistic insight with reactor-scale engineering, Epling’s team works to design catalysts with optimized active site architectures that remain effective across a wide range of conditions.

Research Areas: Environmental catalysis, heterogeneous catalysis, emissions control, catalyst degradation, reactor design

Chemistry

“Organometallic Chemistry as a Platform for Sustainable Catalysis”

Brent Gunnoe’s research begins with atoms and bonds — specifically the unique reactivity that emerges when transition metals form intimate partnerships with organic molecules. His group is a leader in synthetic and mechanistic organometallic chemistry, designing metal complexes whose precisely tuned coordination environments enable selective, efficient catalytic transformations. The group pursues both thermal and electrocatalytic processes, including the selective conversion of abundant hydrocarbon feedstocks and the splitting of water to generate clean hydrogen. What distinguishes Gunnoe’s approach is its combination of creative synthesis with rigorous mechanistic interrogation — his team does not just make catalysts, but understands why they work at a fundamental level.

Research Areas: Organometallic chemistry, molecular catalysis, electrocatalysis, hydrocarbon functionalization, water oxidation

Chemical Engineering

“From Single Atoms to Scalable Catalysts — Precision at the Nanoscale”

Ayman Karim, who joined UVA as Chair of Chemical Engineering in 2025, has built his career on a fundamental challenge: understanding what makes a catalyst active and selective when its metal component is reduced to just single atoms or clusters of a few atoms. At this extreme limit of miniaturization, catalysts behave in ways that bulk materials simply cannot predict — and Karim’s group has developed the experimental tools to observe and interpret this behavior in real time. A co-investigator in the Synchrotron Catalysis Consortium, his team employs advanced X-ray absorption spectroscopy and other state-of-the-art operando techniques to probe catalyst structure at the atomic scale during actual chemical reactions.

Research Areas: Heterogeneous catalysis, single-atom catalysts, subnanometer clusters, in-situ/operando characterization, synchrotron X-ray methods

Chemistry

“Harnessing Electricity and Molecular Ingenuity to Activate Small Molecules”

Charles Machan, who co-chairs CICLEC, brings together inorganic synthesis, electrochemistry, and spectroscopy to pursue a central goal: using electricity derived from renewable sources to drive the activation of small molecules — carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water — in ways that are both selective and efficient. His group is distinctive for its ability to work across the full continuum from discrete molecular catalysts to electrode-immobilized systems, providing a uniquely integrated perspective on how molecular design principles translate into practical electrochemical performance.

Research Areas: Electrocatalysis, inorganic chemistry, spectroelectrochemistry, homogeneous and immobilized catalysts, small molecule activation

Chemical Engineering

“Computing Chemistry — From Quantum Mechanics to Industrial Catalysis”

Chris Paolucci leads CICLEC’s computational catalysis effort, using quantum mechanical simulations and mathematical modeling to understand, predict, and ultimately design catalytic systems. His group specializes in problems of remarkable complexity — particularly the behavior of metal ions and nanoparticles within zeolites, where conditions of temperature, pressure, and chemical environment cause the active catalyst to continuously evolve and transform. Rather than studying an idealized snapshot of a catalyst, Paolucci’s team models these dynamic processes in their full complexity, generating insights that would be nearly impossible to extract from experiments alone.

Research Areas: Computational catalysis, density functional theory, microkinetic modeling, zeolites, catalyst deactivation

Chemistry

“Sculpting Metal at the Nanoscale for Catalysis and Beyond”

Michelle Personick works at a crucial intersection of materials chemistry, surface science, and catalysis — designing metal nanostructures whose shape, composition, and surface chemistry are deliberately controlled to achieve specific catalytic functions. Her group synthesizes nanoparticles with remarkable architectural precision, exploiting the fact that at the nanoscale, even subtle changes in a particle’s geometry or surface structure can dramatically alter how molecules interact with it. This includes work on plasmonic materials — metal nanostructures that interact strongly with light — which opens possibilities for light-driven catalytic processes.

Research Areas: Nanoparticle synthesis, catalysis, plasmonic materials, electrodeposition, surface science

Chemistry

“Listening to Catalysts — With the World’s Most Sensitive Magnetic Ear”

Amrit Venkatesh joined UVA in 2025 and established a research program to make solid-state NMR spectroscopy sensitive enough to characterize the catalytic active sites that control chemical reactions but are present in only tiny amounts. His group develops and applies dynamic nuclear polarization and indirect detection — techniques that can boost NMR sensitivity by 1–2 orders of magnitude — enabling atomic-level structure characterization of nuclei with poor NMR properties, catalyst surfaces, interfaces, and defect sites that would otherwise be invisible to conventional techniques.

Research Areas: Solid-state NMR spectroscopy, dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), materials characterization, surface characterization, catalysts

Chemistry

“Engineering Nanomaterials That Redefine What Catalysts Can Do”

Sen Zhang’s research group operates at the frontier of functional nanomaterials — designing, synthesizing, and characterizing nanostructured catalysts. His group is particularly known for innovative synthesis strategies that produce nanostructures with unprecedented control over composition, morphology, and surface properties. Equally important to Zhang’s approach is the use of in-situ and operando characterization techniques — tools that observe catalysts as they actually function, rather than before and after — providing direct insight into how nanostructure evolves and governs activity under reaction conditions.

Research Areas: Functional nanomaterials, in-situ/operando characterization, energy and environmental catalysis, electrocatalysis

Chemistry

“Engineering Nanostructured Interfaces for a Cleaner and Circular Nitrogen and Carbon Economy”

Huiyuan Zhu’s research sits at the intersection of two of the most pressing challenges in sustainable chemistry: the need to manage reactive nitrogen species in the environment, and the imperative to reduce atmospheric CO₂ by converting it into useful chemicals and fuels. Her group takes a materials-first approach, developing synthetic strategies to create nanocrystals and two-dimensional materials with atomically precise surfaces and interfaces. By rationally engineering metal-metal, metal-oxide, and metal-ligand interfaces, her team designs electrocatalysts that achieve the selectivity and efficiency necessary for practical nitrogen and carbon conversion applications.

Research Areas: Electrocatalysis, nitrogen chemistry, CO₂ reduction, nanocrystal synthesis, interfacial engineering, 2D materials