Robert Coridan, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, recently received two individual awards totaling $110,000 at the Scialog: Negative Emissions Science conference, a meeting of Scialog Fellows sponsored by the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement and the Sloan Foundation.

Coridan is a principal investigator on two projects honored by Scialog, "Using Electrochemistry to Improve Selectivity of Plasma-Assisted CO2 Reduction" and "Integrated Low-Temperature Electrified Process for CO2 Direct Air Capture and Transformation to Solid Carbon."

The 2020 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards were given to eight collaborative research teams, representing universities across the United States and Canada. Coridan is working with researchers from the University of British Columbia, the University of California, Irvine, the University of Rochester and the University of California, Los Angeles.

A Scialog (a combination of the words "science" and "dialog") is meant to help develop a research community to address scientific challenges of global significance. Scialog Fellows participate in annual meetings over the three-year course of the Scialog to develop collaborations and ideas to tackle these challenges. The Collaborative Innovation Awards initiate research into ideas developed at the meetings.

The 2020 Scialog for Negative Emissions Science, held virtually in November, was the first to address solutions for the removal and utilization of greenhouse gases. Other Scialogs have considered topics from a broad range of scientific disciplines, including Advanced Energy Storage, the Chemical Machinery of the Cell, and Signatures of Life in the Universe.

Funding for the research awards was provided by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Thistledown Foundation.