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The Arthur Nozik Lecture Series honors the research and career of Prof. Nozik, who has been a leader in the thriving ecosystem of renewable energy research that has developed along the front range over the last four decades. This lecture was recorded on December 9, 2024.

Biography:

Matthew C. Beard is a senior laboratory research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Director of the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE) and Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) funded by the Office of Science within DOE.  Beard is also a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute a joint research institute between NREL and ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ Boulder and an Adjoint professor within the Chemistry department of ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ School of Mines.  Beard has been at NREL since 2003 (working for Arthur Nozik) and before that graduated from the Yale Chemistry Department where he received his Ph.D. degree developing non-contact ultrafast probes of carrier dynamics in semiconductors and semiconductor nanocrystals with Charlie Schmuttenmaer.  Beard also served as Associate director for the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics.  Beard is a fellow of the AAAS, American Physical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Beard is listed a Clarivate highly cited researcher from 2023-2018 with over 200 publications.  Beard was awarded the 2020 H.M. Hubbard award, the 2022 E.O. Lawarence Award from DOE, the RSC Chemical Dynamics award, and NREL’s highest impact paper in 2024.  Beard serves on the editorial boards of Phyiscal Review Letters (divisional editor), ACS Energy Letters and Journal of Chemical Physics.  He has 10 patents and patent applications under review and given  > 150 invited presentations, including being named the 2024 Alexander Cruickshank Gordon research conference lecturer, the 2022 McElvain lecturer at U. of Wisconsin, and the 2024 William Chupka Lecturer at Yale University.

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RASEI Fellow Niels Damrauer is part of a collaborative team that have developed a new light-driven C-F activation reaction, one that has the potential to help dismantle PFAS ‘forever chemicals’

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are synthetic compounds that have found widespread use in consumer products and industrial applications. Their water and grease resistant properties have been part of their attraction in their applications, but these are also the reason that they are now found practically everywhere in the environment, they are very difficult to decompose.

While many chemicals will decompose relatively quickly, studies have shown that PFAS are expected to stick around for up to 1000 years. While this durability is great in something like firefighting foams or non-stick cookware, it is not great when these compounds get into the environment.

This new article, published in Nature in November of 2024, describes the work of a collaborative team of theoretical and experimental chemists, who have developed a new photochemical reaction that could hold promise of speeding up the decomposition of PFAS. A recent highlight of this work, written by the graduate student and postdoctoral fellows who did the research, appeared in The Conversation.

Using a photocatalyst, that absorbs light to speed up a reaction, the researchers were able to ‘activate’ one of the carbon-fluorine bonds, one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry. The photocatalyst absorbs light, transfers electrons to the fluorine containing molecules, which then breaks down the sturdy carbon-fluorine bond.

While this doesn’t decompose the whole molecule, it is essentially like finding a chink in the armor, it opens the door to degradation of the PFAS to harmless smaller molecules.

This study demonstrated this process on a small scale, and the researchers are looking at how to optimize this reaction so it is more robust and can be done on larger scales. This work is part of a National Science Foundation funded Center for Chemical Innovation called SuPRCat, a research community that will be looking at this challenge, among others.

If it is possible to break down these forever chemicals, it will help prevent these environmental pollutants being in our soil, rivers, and drinking water. Excited to see the next steps from the team!

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