Students selected for Kokes national travel awards
Congratulations to Dishari Basu (Umit Ozkan Group) and Leah Ford (Nicholas Brunelli Group) for receiving 2023 Kokes Travel Awards to attend the 28th North American Meeting (NAM) of the North American Catalysis Society (NACS). The biennial conference will be held in Providence, RI June 18-23. The award is sponsored by NACS with support from agencies such as NSF and the DOE.
Dishari Basu will present "Enhancement in the ORR Activity of Nitrogen – Doped Carbon Nanostructures Via Electrochemical Bromine Doping" at the conference.
This Kokes award is Basu's third travel award. This past November, Basu traveled to Phoenix with assistance from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers' (AIChE) Catalysis and Reaction Engineering (CRE) Travel Award. A year prior, she was awarded the Tri-State Catalysis Society Travel Award.
Leah Ford also received a 2023 Kokes Award. Her presentation is titled “Quantifying active catalytic sites in Lewis acidic zeolite Sn-Beta." Her research involves designing, characterizing, and testing zeolites to improve their performance as catalysts for different reactions. Specifically, the goal of the work is to use a unique approach to quantify the catalytic sites in zeolite Sn-Beta. The objective is to establish new synthesis – structure – activity relationships that will enable the zeolite catalyst to be tuned for specific reactions.
Previously, Ford received recognition at the department's September 2022 Graduate Research Symposium, where she won Third Place for Outstanding Poster.
