Catalysis students win national awards

Several graduate students won national travel awards for their outstanding research. The students presented their research findings at the international meeting of the North American Catalysis Society held in New York City, May 21-27, 2022.

Dishari Basu, from the Umit S. Ozkan Laboratory for Heterogeneous Catalysis and Electrocatalysis, was awarded the 2022 Tri-State Catalysis Society Travel Award to give a presentation titled “Highly Active Nitrogen-doped Carbon Nanostructures as Bromine Evolution Reaction Electrocatalysts."

Basu also received a William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Outstanding Graduate Student Award for Academic Achievement this spring.

Previously, she received an Outstanding Poster Award in the Top 10 Poster Competition at the Ohio State Institute for Materials Research's 2019 Materials Week Conference. Her poster was titled "Preferential Oxidation of Carbon Monoxide over Swellable Organically Modified Silica (SOMS) supported Cobalt Oxide."

Anagha Hunoor was selected for the 2022 North American Catalysis Society Kokes Travel Award, given every two years. Her paper is titled “On the dual role of the reactant during aqueous phase hydrodechlorination of trichloroethylene (HDC of TCE) using Pd supported on swellable organically modified silica (SOMS)." Hunoor is also a member of the Umit S. Ozkan Laboratory for Heterogeneous Catalysis and Electrocatalysis.

Also this spring, Hunoor received a William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Outstanding Graduate Student Award for Academic Achievement.

Last fall, Hunoor won the AIChE Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division 2021 Travel Award to present her research paper at the 2021 AIChE Annual Meeting to be held in Boston this November. Her paper was titled “On the dual-role of the reactant during aqueous-phase hydrodechlorination of tri-chloroethylene using Pd catalysts supported on swellable organically modified silica (SOMS)”. 

Basu and Hunoor both served as co-leaders for the department's September 2020 Dow Graduate Research Symposium.

Jee-Yee Chen also received a 2022 Tri-State Catalysis Society Travel Award to make a presentation. Chen, from the Nicholas Brunelli laboratory, works on zeolites to advance mesoporous catalysts.

Her presentation was titled "Quantifying the Effect of Surface Density of Aminosilanes on the Fraction of Active Sites in SBA-15 for the Aldol Condensation."