Vignesh Sundaresan
University of Mississippi, MS·Chemistry·Early-career
Turning electricity into fuels and chemicals, for example splitting water to make hydrogen or converting carbon dioxide into useful feedstocks, depends on electrocatalysts: materials that let these reactions happen efficiently at an electrode surface. A persistent problem is that conventional electrochemical measurements report only an average over billions of catalyst particles and pores, hiding the fact that individual particles differ in size, shape and surface chemistry and therefore in activity.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
electrocatalysis
nanoporous electrodes
nanopore electrode array
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through May 2031
What they work on
- Fabricate monolithic nanopore electrode arrays with precisely defined pore size and interconnectivity to test how nanoscale confinement and mass transport govern the efficiency and product selectivity of hydrogen evolution and carbon dioxide reduction.
- Resolve single-nanopore activity, local pH gradients, intermediate residence times and product formation during operating reactions by combining scanning electrochemical cell microscopy with correlated optical and spectroelectrochemical measurements.
- Derive predictive design rules linking pore geometry and connectivity to electrocatalyst efficiency and selectivity in nanoporous metal electrodes.
- Build CLocK microscopy, which uses a rotating calcite crystal in the microscope's infinity space to split scattered light into two polarizations, and use its clock-shaped image pattern to measure the position, anisotropy and orientation of single nanoparticles.
- Quantify how anisotropy and orientation of individual nanoparticles change during electrocatalytic reactions and link those changes to activity by integrating CLocK with scanning electrochemical cell microscopy, then extend it to particle transport via nanoparticle collision electrochemistry.
- Probe arrays of individual electrocatalysts spaced at defined distances using direct-approach scanning electrochemical cell microscopy rather than raster scanning, to screen single entities at high throughput.
- Validate electrofluorogenic probes, molecules that fluoresce when a reaction occurs, as an optical proxy for electrochemical activity to enable massively parallel catalyst screening.
More about the research
Work in this lab builds measurement tools that resolve single particles and single pores, so that structure can be tied directly to performance. Three projects share that thread: one probes reactions inside individual nanopores, one tracks how individual nanoparticles change shape while they work, and one makes single-entity screening fast enough to test many catalysts at once.
Why it matters
Cleaner routes to hydrogen fuel and to chemicals made from carbon dioxide depend on catalysts whose performance is currently judged only by bulk averages. Measuring single nanopores and single nanoparticles while they react could reveal why some perform far better than others, yielding design rules for pore size, connectivity and particle shape that make electrochemical fuel and chemical production more efficient and more selective. The tools themselves would also speed up catalyst screening for the broader materials community.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Advancing Electrocatalysis with Monolithic Nanoporous Electrodes: A Study of Redox Transport and Confinement
NSF · Jun 2026 – May 2031
Quantitative Multiparameter Super-resolution Imaging of Electrochemical Phenomena at the Nanoscale
NSF · Jul 2024 – Jun 2027
RII Track-4:NSF: Integrated Electrochemical-Optical Microscopy for High Throughput Screening of Electrocatalysts
NSF · Feb 2024 – Jan 2027
Closest labs
Lane Baker
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Chemistry
Build Optically Guided Nanoscale Electrochemical Imaging (OG-NEI), hardware and protocols that combine scanned-probe electrochemical imaging with bright field, dark field and fluorescence optical imaging at the same time.
Haimei Zheng
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Chemistry
Fabricate electrochemical liquid cells with precisely controlled electrode potentials that allow high-resolution, real-time transmission electron microscope imaging of catalysts during carbon dioxide reduction.
Mario Alpuche-Aviles
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Chemistry
Develop a redox-mediated electrochemical scheme that detects antibody-gold-nanoparticle conjugates at ultramicroelectrodes under 30 micrometers across, selecting redox mediator pairs using Marcus theory of electron transfer.
The school
University of Mississippi: 2 labs on PI Pages, $190M a year on research, 242 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.