Georgia Institute of Technology Materials Science and Engineering

Dr. Guihua Yu

Assistant Professor

Materials Science and Engineering, Texas Materials Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA, Email: ghyu@austin.utexas.edu; Website: http://yugroup.me.utexas.edu/

Monday, January 23, 2017

4:00 p.m. GTMI/Callaway Bldg. Auditorium

Reception at 3:30 p.m. in the GTMI Atrium

Designing Functional Organic Nanomaterials for

Advanced Energy Technologies

Abstract:

 Nanostructured materials have become critically important in many areas of technology, ranging from renewable energy, electronics, and photonics to biology and medicine, because of their unusual physical/chemical properties due to confined dimensions of such materials. This talk will present a new class of polymeric materials we developed recently: nanostructured conducting polymer gels (nCPGs) that are hierarchically porous, and structurally tunable in terms of size, shape, composition, hierarchical porosity, and chemical interfaces. nCPGs as functional organic building blocks offer an array of advantageous features such as intrinsic 3D nanostructured conducting framework, exceptional electrical conductivity and electrochemical activity to store and transport ions, synthetically tunable structures and chemical interface, and they have been demonstrated powerful for a number of applications in energy, environment and healthcare technologies. Several examples on nCPGs-enabled advanced energy and smart electronic devices including high-energy lithium batteries, supercapacitors, self-healing, and adaptive electronics, will be discussed to illustrate ‘structure-derived multifunctionality’ of this special class of materials.

 Biography:

 Dr. Guihua Yu is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. degree with the highest honor in chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China, and earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University, followed by postdoc training at Stanford University. His research has been focused on rational synthesis and self-assembly of functional organic nanomaterials and two-dimensional nanostructured inorganic solids for advanced energy, environmental and healthcare technologies. He has received several notable awards/honors for young scientists including recent TMS Early Career Faculty Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Chemical Society Reviews Emerging Investigator Lectureship, MIT Technology Review ‘35 Top Innovators Under 35’, 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, US Frontiers of Engineering by NAE, Emerging Young Investigator named by Royal Society of Chemistry (J. Mater. Chem.) and American Chemical Society (Chem. Mater.), Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Award, IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists. Dr. Yu is serving as an Advisory/Editorial board member of Chem (Cell Press), Nature Scientific Reports, Energy Storage Materials (Elsevier), Frontiers in Energy Research, Science China Materials.

 Host:  Dr. Meilin Liu