Michele Sarazen
Princeton University, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Many everyday products, from jet fuel to medicines, depend on catalysts: materials that speed up chemical reactions and steer them toward useful products while using less energy. Good catalysts must react quickly, make the right product, and keep working over time.
- Fields
Engineering
Chemistry
Materials Science
- Topics
heterogeneous catalysis
zeolites
bifunctional catalysts
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2029
What they work on
- Make hierarchical bifunctional zeolites, which combine tiny and larger pores with metal and acid sites, and test how their pore structure and connectivity change rates of polyolefin hydrocracking and catalyst deactivation.
- Test how the balance and proximity of metal and acid sites, and reactions in mesopores and on surface protons, control which products form when waste polyolefin plastics are broken down over zeolite catalysts.
- Combine catalyst synthesis with reaction-pathway and deactivation analysis to track the full lifecycle of zeolite catalysts during plastic upcycling, and to see how shape-selectivity and molecular transport set performance.
- Measure how pore hydrophobicity, acidity, and the environment around the iron site in iron-based MIL metal-organic frameworks affect the rate, selectivity, and stability of 1-octene oxidation with hydrogen peroxide, using kinetic experiments.
- Determine how iron-carboxylate MOF catalysts deactivate and can be reactivated, pairing materials characterization with density functional theory models to predict more promising MOF compositions.
More about the research
Many lose activity as they are used. This research asks how the internal structure of porous solid catalysts controls all three properties. It follows the catalyst's full lifecycle: how it reacts, how it deactivates, and how it can be reactivated. Two projects apply this question to different problems. One uses zeolites to turn waste plastic into fuels and chemicals. The other uses metal-organic frameworks to carry out selective oxidation reactions used in industry.
Why it matters
Upcycling plastic waste into fuel and chemical building blocks at moderate temperatures could offer a lower-carbon source of feedstocks for hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as aviation fuel. Understanding why MOF catalysts degrade could help chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturers build sturdier catalysts and waste fewer spent ones. It could also support oxidation processes that use cheaper, more abundant metals and gentler oxidants. The same insights may extend to biomass, renewable alcohols, and CO2 processing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Dianne Xiao
University of Washington, WA·Chemistry·Early-career
Develop a templating strategy to precisely position multiple metal centers and organic functional groups within metal–organic framework pores, giving uniform, tunable active sites on a solid support.
Tendai Gadzikwa
Kansas State University, KS·Chemistry·Early-career
Determine the molecular origins of unexpected reactivity observed within and on multifunctional metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), porous crystals with several chemical groups placed close together, using machine learning.
Siris Laursen
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Chemistry
Determine how the composition of non-noble metal intermetallic compounds controls their activity for removing oxygen from polyols such as glycerol, using quantum chemical surface modeling and experiments.
The school
Princeton University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $559M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.