Dianne Xiao
University of Washington, WA·Chemistry·Early-career
Enzymes speed up reactions by placing several chemical groups exactly where they need to be, so that they work together on a molecule. Solid catalysts used in industry rarely achieve that precision.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
heterogeneous catalysis
metal-organic frameworks
bimetallic catalysts
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine how acid–base distance, pKa and structural flexibility affect the activity and stability of bifunctional acid–base catalysts for aldol condensation of biomass-derived molecules.
- Determine how metal identity, the number of metal centers and the surrounding ligands control O2 activation and transfer at bimetallic sites for aerobic oxidation catalysis.
More about the research
This limits what chemists know about how paired active sites behave on a surface. The project borrows this enzyme-inspired idea to design heterogeneous catalysts, meaning solid catalysts that are easy to separate from reaction products. The goal is cleaner chemical synthesis that uses renewable starting materials and replaces hazardous reagents.
Why it matters
Chemical manufacturing often depends on fossil feedstocks and hazardous reagents. Catalysts that efficiently convert biomass, or that use air as an oxidant, could make chemical synthesis cleaner and help turn waste into valuable products. The design rules from this work could inform future condensation and oxidation catalysts that follow green chemistry principles.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Michele Sarazen
Princeton University, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
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.
John Anderson
University of Chicago, IL·Chemistry
Use metal oxo complexes that can be made highly basic to test how separate proton- and electron-transfer driving forces control concerted proton-electron transfer during C–H bond oxidation.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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