Wang Selected for Catalyst Award
Thirty-seven early-career Johns Hopkins faculty members have been chosen to receive up to $75,000 from the university's new Catalyst Awards program to pursue their research and creative endeavors....
Wang Chosen for AFOSR’s Young Investigator Research Program
Chao Wang, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been selected by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to receive a 2014 Young Investigator Research Program grant.
The Young Investigators Program recognizes engineers and scientists who have received their PhDs or equivalent degrees within the last five years and who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. The program aims to foster creative basic research, as well as to enhance early investigators’ career development.
Chao, whose research focuses on the development of advanced nanomaterials and nanotechnologies to address global challenges such as renewable energy and green chemical engineering, is supported for his work in tailoring magnetic nanomaterials for electromagnetic wave absorption....
A New Breed of Catalysts
The idea is simple: Capture the carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by gasoline-and-oil-burning vehicles, factories, and power plants, and convert it into fuel, preventing the CO2 from contributing to climate change and creating a sustainable, eco-friendly cycle.
But doing so is not as easy as it sounds. Why? Because it takes an enormous amount of energy to transform CO2 into useful fuels such as methanol. The key lies in catalysts: substances that speed up chemical reactions.
Under a $1 million National Science Foundation grant, Timothy Mueller and Chao Wang are teaming up in search of a new breed of catalysts. They are taking a two-pronged approach to designing nanoparticle-sized alloy catalysts that they contend have the potential to be both more stable and more powerful than the single-material catalysts currently used to convert CO2 to methanol.
“We are using a combined computational-experimental approach to tackle this challenge,” says Mueller, an assistant professor of materials science. He and Wang, an assistant professor of...