Abstract Regulating Coordination Environments and Spin States for Precise Control of Sustainable Energy Catalytic Pathways
Speaker: Dr. Fan He
Affiliation: Incoming Postdoctoral Research Associate, Georgia Institute of Technology
Developing highly efficient and selective electrocatalysts for sustainable energy conversion—such as oxygen evolution, H2O2 production, and CO2 valorization—is crucial for achieving global carbon neutrality. However, conventional catalytic systems are often bottlenecked by empirical scaling relations and sluggish kinetics. To transcend these thermodynamic limits, it is essential to manipulate active sites at both the structural and quantum levels. This seminar will focus on two research strategies of integrating coordination environment tuning with interfacial spin-state regulation as a powerful dual-lever approach to precisely steer electrocatalytic pathways.
In the first part of the talk, I will review our foundational work on designing and identifying atomic-scale active sites. By precisely manipulating the coordination numbers, local symmetries, and heteroatom doping of the catalytic centers, we successfully optimized the electronic structure and adsorption free energies of key intermediates. Crucially, we discovered that engineering these local coordination spheres serves as a foundational guidance for breaking inversion symmetry at the interface. This structural asymmetry creates an ideal platform for leveraging the Chiral Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS) effect, allowing for the generation of spin-polarized electrons without the need for external magnetic fields. I will demonstrate how this spin-gatekeeping mechanism dynamically decoupling reaction pathways, leading to unprecedented selectivity in water oxidation and carbon dioxide reduction to high-value products. Building upon these preliminary insights, the second part of the seminar will outline my future independent research vision at GTIIT, which expands across three highly integrated thrusts:
1. Atomic-scale synergy: tailoring the localized ligand fields of hetero-linker/catalyst junctions to create unsaturated coordinative environment, lock the desired spin state for suppressing unwanted side reactions at the root. 2. Spin-related intermediate control: directing the critical carbon-carbon (C-C) coupling pathway during CO2 reduction by modulating the spin orientation of intermediates on spin-polarized interface for selective products generation. 3. Macroscopic scale & dynamics: Scaling up these molecular quantum effects into high- current-density, zero-gap membrane electrode assembly (MEA), flow cells, while tracking the real-time dynamic evolution of coordination geometry and spin polarization using custom-built operando Magnetic Circular Dichroism (MCD) spectroscopy.
Ultimately, this multidisciplinary program aims to establish a leading laboratory at GTIIT that bridges fundamental coordination/quantum chemistry with tangible chemical engineering solutions, defining a new frontier in sustainable chemical manufacturing.
Biography: Dr. Fan He is an incoming Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his Ph.D. from Zhejiang University, where his research pioneered novel interfacial designs for energy conversion systems. Dr. He’s research interests lie at the intersection of coordination chemistry, spin-polarized electrocatalysis, operando spectroscopy, and systems-level chemical engineering. His work has been published in top-tier international journals in chemistry and materials science.