Lars Grabow seminar (Piercy Lecture)
Abstract
In addition to changing catalyst composition, catalytic performance can also be improved by engineering the catalyst’s working environment. A recurring theme in our work is that the local chemical environment at metal-support interfaces can fundamentally alter catalytic function. In Au/TiO2, for example, water and surface hydroxyls act not merely as spectators, but as active participants that promote O2 activation during CO oxidation by supplying protons, while inhibiting heterolytic H2 activation by modulating charge transfer across the interface. Related studies on Ru/TiO2 showed that water can be used to tune selectivity during hydrodeoxygenation of phenolic compounds by controlling the Brønsted acid/base character of interfacial sites involved in C–O bond cleavage. Together, these studies point to a broader mechanistic framework in which the catalyst environment, rather than catalyst composition alone, determines reactivity.
Building on these insights, we are now investigating how catalytic performance can be improved through dynamic operation and programmable external stimuli. Using detailed kinetic and reactor models, we show that forced oscillations in feed composition can transiently create optimal surface conditions, suppress poisoning, and enhance rate or selectivity beyond steady-state limits. In parallel, catalytic condensers offer a route to periodically modulate catalyst electron density and surface binding energies, allowing us to overcome the traditional Sabatier constraint. Light provides a further handle for controlling catalyst function, for example, photon-driven CO desorption on Pt catalysts provides a handle to limit CO poisoning through photonic stimulation. The long-term vision is to move beyond static catalyst design toward programmable catalysis, in which the chemical, electrical, photonic, and temporal environment is actively controlled to place a catalyst in its optimal state for each step of the reaction cycle.
Biography
Prof. Lars Grabow is the George T. Piercy Visiting Professor in Chemical Engineering and Material Science at the University of Minnesota and the Dan Luss Professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 2008, followed by postdoctoral appointments at the Technical University of Denmark and Stanford University. His expertise is the application of electronic structure calculations, kinetic modeling, data science and transient kinetic characterization to problems in heterogeneous and photo-/electrocatalysis, surface science, and energy transition. Dr. Grabow was elected into the 2018 Class of Influential Researchers by Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (IE&C) Research, won the prestigious U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Award (2014), and the NSF CAREER Award (2015), and most recently, the Excellence in Catalysis Award from the New York Catalysis Society (NYCS, 2026). He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of ChemistryEurope, and was previously Editor of Surface Science.
