Purdue Catalysis Center

The Purdue Catalysis Center (PCC) is a highly interactive association of the research groups of Professors Rakesh Agrawal, Nicholas Delgass, Rajamani Gounder, Jeffrey Greeley, Christina Li, Peilin Liao, Jeffrey Miller, Fabio Ribeiro.

The mission of the Purdue Catalysis Center is to:

• Promote quality and innovative research in the area of catalysis
• Serve as a platform for collaborative research efforts fostering the interaction between industry, national labs, and academia.
• Educate a new generation of catalysis researchers in the theory and best practices of catalytic science.

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:

Area of Expertise	Goal
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.