The Purdue Catalysis Center (PCC) is a highly interactive association of the research groups of Professors:
Rakesh Agrawal, Rajamani Gounder, David Hibbitts, Enrique Iglesia, Christina Li, Jeffrey Miller, Fabio Ribeiro, and Brian Tackett.
Mission
Promote quality and innovative research in the area of catalysis.
Serve as a platform for collaborative research efforts fostering interaction between industry, national labs, and academia.
Educate a new generation of catalysis researchers in the theory and best practices of catalytic science.
Objective
Advances in catalysis will be driven by design of increasingly selective active sites, enabled by new synthesis chemistries, detailed chemical and kinetic characterization, and strong guidance from theory. To achieve this, we have built a team with experts in the following areas:
Materials synthesis
Achieve well-defined active sites of specified composition, geometry, and spatial positioning.
Catalyst characterization
Observe local chemistry of active sites and their interaction with adsorbed and reaction molecules, ideally in operando.
Chemical kinetics
Propose sequence of elementary reaction steps and describe both steady state and dynamic response data.
Electronic structure calculations
Test “picture” of catalytic reaction, use trends to predict optimum catalysts, compute energies that are hard to measure.
The Purdue Catalysis Center is uniquely positioned to push this research frontier forward and eager to bring its strengths to address new catalytic challenges.