Chemistry Seminar on 'Artificial Photosynthesis' Tomorrow

photo submitted

Robert Coridan

The U of A's Robert Coridan will give a virtual seminar titled "Artificial photosynthesis: chemical approaches for converting sunlight to fuels" on Zoom from 8:15-9:15 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 11. The talk is free and open to the public.

Professor Robert Coridan received his B.S. in physics/CIS at Ohio State University in 2002 and received his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology from 2010 to 2015. While he was a postdoc, Coridan served as a physics lecturer for the Caltech Juice from Juice Program, where graduate students, postdocs, and professors taught high school students and teachers about solar energy. He also mentored undergraduate students in the Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program.

He joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry as an assistant professor in 2015. His research group, the Hierarchically Structured Materials Group, has several research interests: hierarchically structured electrochemical materials, advantageously disordered materials, and methods for real-space characterization of electrochemical processes.

In 2019, Coridan received an Early Career Research Award for his work on improving the efficiency of chemical reactions that convert solar energy into chemical fuels. This research is focused on the optical and photochemical properties of defects in randomly distributed films of nanoscophere colloids — nanoscopic glass and plastic beads. The goal of this research is to devise easy-to-fabricate and scalable nanostructures that maximize a material's ability to convert the sun's energy into chemical bonds, or fuels, a process similar to photosynthesis in plants.

To attend the seminar, please visit the Zoom link.
Meeting ID: 813 4397 0862
Password: 2Photons!