For nearly 20 years, my research group has developed close collaborations with industry. In this work, we seek to address underlying questions that might enable advances in complex industrial chemistry. These are
use-informed problems where, “research moves bidirectionally... between fundamental and applied considerations such that fundamental findings remain relevant to concrete value propositions and applied demonstrations are understood mechanistically, so they can be generalized to diverse use cases.” [1] Through this lens, messy, open-ended problems are ideal environments to educate the next generation of chemical engineers in catalysis and reaction engineering. Using examples from my laboratory, this lecture will highlight a few lessons I have taken away from industrial collaborations or participation in industrial consortia, and which I have tried to pass on to my students: 1) context matters, 2) good insights and good catalysts are not the same thing, 3) it’s OK to do new and weird things, but you must justify why.
[1] Dean M. Miller, Kristen Abels, Jinyu Guo, Kindle S. Williams, Matthew J. Liu, and William A. Tarpeh, “Electrochemical Wastewater Refining: A Vision for Circular Chemical Manufacturing,” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023 145 (36), 19422-19439.
