On July 1, HUST-QMUL Academic Lecture Series was successfully held in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, HUST. At the invitation of Prof. Xia Baoyu of the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering HUST, Devis Di Tommaso, Associate Professor of Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) gave an invited lecture entitled “Revealing the elementary processes controlling the conversion of small and abundant molecules to added-value chemicals & materials”. The lecture was hosted by Prof. Xia Baoyu, and more than 50 students and researchers from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and School of Materials Science and Engineering participated online.

Photo | Devis giving the lecture

In this lecture, Devis presented that the transformations of the abundant small molecules such as carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) has the potential to contribute toward establishing an environmentally sensible circulation of energy and materials. Then he introduced recent results conducted in his group at Queen Mary University, including how solution composition conditions promote the low-temperature CO₂ conversion into magnesite (MgCO₃), the CH₄ conversion to porous nanographene on transition-metal-free catalysts and Ab initio random structure searching of Cu-based nanocluster for the electrocatalytic conversion of CO₂. In the end, Devis discuss the use of computational chemistry as a tool to reveal the early stages of these conversion processes and to support the design of catalysts and operation conditions promoting this conversion.

Photo | Devis introducing CO₂ adsorption and activation

During the Q&A part, Devis exchanged ideas with the participants, and had a heated discussion on hot research issues such as transformations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄), computational chemistry and etc., providing new research ideas and directions in the field of membranes.