Os esperamos en una nueva edición de ITQ Talks!
En esta jornada contaremos con Prof. Ambarish Kulkarni quien impartirá la charla «Accelerated Design of Functional Materials: Overcoming the ‘Valley of Death’ in Heterogeneous Catalysis«.
Esta edición de ITQ Talks se realizará el 9 de diciembre de 2024 a las 11h a.m. en el Salón de Actos del ITQ (UPV-CSIC).
CV Prof. Ambarish Kulkarni
Ambar Kulkarni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UC Davis. After receiving his B.S. from the Institute of Chemical Technology (formerly UDCT), Mumbai (India), he moved to the U.S. to complete his Ph.D. (Georgia Tech, with David Sholl) and postdoc (Stanford, with Jens Nørskov). Since 2018, his research group has focused on combining advances in multiscale molecular modeling and machine learning with multifaceted experimental collaborations to address the challenges in catalysis, separations, and chemical sensing. His research group has experience with a variety of functional materials (e.g., zeolites, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), metals, oxides), simulation methodologies, and automated analyses of experimental results (e.g., X-ray absorption spectroscopy, NMR spectroscopy, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy). Research in the Kulkarni group is supported through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE),and several industry partnerships.
Kulkarni’s interdisciplinary research and teaching were recognized with the UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Research and UC Davis College of Engineering Best Teaching Award in 2021. He received a 2021 NSF CAREER award for his work in designing MOFs for electrochemical applications. As the Inaugural UC Davis Graduate Mentor Fellow (2020 – present), Kulkarni has developed a series of mentorship workshops for UC Davis faculty aimed at improving the graduate student mentorship experience. When he is not staring at molecules on the computer screen, Ambar and his wife enjoy traveling to different countries, snowboarding, and photography.
Accelerated Design of Functional Materials: Overcoming the “Valley of Death” in Heterogeneous Catalysis
The democratization of machine learning (ML), the advent of open-access data repositories, and access to growing supercomputing resources are revolutionizing the fields of materials science and heterogeneous catalysis. These advances have enabled high-throughput screening of catalyst libraries at unprecedented scales. However, compared to numerous reports of in-silico discoveries of novel catalysts for various reactions, the anticipated acceleration in lab-scale synthesis and testing, pilot-scale validation, and downstream development of novel processes have been relatively lackluster. In light of the growing severity of the climate change crisis and the changing national security landscape, there is an urgent need to bridge the gap between the computational discovery, experimental realization, and scale-up of promising catalysts.
The overarching goal of this seminar is to illustrate how an interdisciplinary and team-oriented approach can be used to address key challenges within the heterogeneous catalysis community. Using examples spanning zeolites, metal-organic frameworks and supported oxide catalysts, this talk will illustrate (1) the capabilities and limitations of the current computational methods, (2) the unique insights provided by theory (used in close collaboration with experiments), and (3) the central role of software development, data engineering, and robotics as enablers for ML-based materials development pipelines. Taken together, this talk will present a cohesive vision for the expanding role of theory and data science (used judiciously in conjunction with experimentation) to accelerate innovations in emerging technologies that rely on the development of functional materials.
