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Abstract:

Design and synthesis of porous structures with desired pore environments are essential for many energy-related industrial applications, including separation, storage, and catalysis. From a perspective of synthetic chemistry, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are regarded as a series of crystalline porous structures that are highly tunable over their components and pore spaces. In addition, the presence of labile or reactive sites, including labile coordination bonds and dynamic covalent bonds, enables researchers to precisely tune the pore environments for guest recognition and capture.

The Zhou group focuses on the pore engineering of MOFs, which includes but not limited to the generation of various levels (microporous, nanoporous, mesoporous, and macroporous) of porosity, the creation of hierarchically porous structures, pore surface modification, the construction of composite materials, pore combination, and pore partition. The structural modification of the intrinsic cavities within MOFs results in alteration of functionality, such as selective recognition and cooperative behavior. This structure-property relationship highlights the importance of constructing pore spaces with precisely controlled sizes and functionalities for various chemical processes. The pore engineering methods are expected to be applicable to diverse MOFs, which shall provide essential guidance on synthesizing increasingly complex materials for various practical applications, especially for catalysis and bio-medical applications.

The seminar will cover synsthetic methods that have been developed in the Zhou lab such as “bridging-ligand substitution”, “ligand-fragment co-assembly”, “kinetic analysis and tuning”, “linker installation”, “linker labilization”, “cluster and linker metalation”, “linker migration”, “domino lattice rearrangement”, and “retrosynthetic design”.

Biography:

Hong-Cai “Joe” Zhou obtained his Ph.D. in 2000 from Texas A&M University. After a postdoctoral stint at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of Miami University, Oxford in 2002 and was awarded tenure in 2007. He was hired by Texas A&M University in 2008 as a full professor and was promoted to a Davidson Professor of Science in 2014. He became a Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in 2015. He was elected a fellow of AAAS, ACS, and RSC, respectively in 2016. He was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate) from 2014 to 2021 in eight consecutive years. He is a pioneer in “pore engineering”. His recent research focuses on the discovery of synthetic methods to obtain robust framework materials with unique catalytic activities or desirable properties for clean-energy-related applications such as gas storage and catalysis. He has published more than 424 papers with an h-index of 114 (Web of Science accessed on Feb. 18, 2022).