University of Toronto | Solar Fuels Cluster

Charles A. Mims

Professor
Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry

Mims has extensive experience in heterogeneous catalysis and reaction engineering from his previous work for Exxon Research and Engineering, and is the director of the newly established Ontario Centre for Characterization of Advanced Materials (OCCAM) in UofT’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. He will lead the effort in solar fuels materials reaction engineering, designing highly precise methodology to quantitatively assess and optimize photocatalytic rates, scale-up strategies and techno-economic analyses of materials manufacturing and photoreactor engineering.
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Cathy Chin

Assistant Professor
Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry
Heterogeneous Catalysis, Chemical Kinetics, and Reaction Engineering

Chin will probe the mechanism of photocatalytic pathways of solar fuels materials based on isotopic transient, kinetic methodology, and in-situ spectroscopic techniques to establish the correlation between their atomic structures and photo-catalytic reactivity. She will also bring in expertise from previous involvement in commercialization of micro-chemical reactors at Pacific Northwest National Lab.
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Doug D. Perovic

Professor and Celestica Chair in Materials for Microelectronics
Materials Science & Engineering

Perovic has extensive expertise in the chemical and structural characterization of nanoscale materials using transmission electron microscopy. He will supervise experimental efforts to fully characterize size, structure and surfaces of the library of photoactive nanomaterials synthesized in Ozin’s group.
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Ben Hatton

Assistant Professor
Materials Science & Engineering
Microstructural Surface Design and Control

Hatton has expertise in the design of surface microstructures and microfluidic networks and devices. He will provide the developmental tools to engineer bio-inspired microfluidic devices to increase the surface area for molecular surface adsorption and reaction efficiency of solar fuels materials.
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Chandra Veer Singh

Assistant Professor
Materials Science & Engineering
Computational Materials Design

Singh will focus on understanding the theoretical underpinnings of the photocatalytic behavior of solar fuels nanomaterials, which will enable computational discovery of novel material systems. He will use ‘first-principles’ calculations to investigate band-gap energies and alignments of designed photocatalysts, stable binding sites for molecular adsorption and determination of reaction pathways and activation energies for the photo-oxidation and photo-reduction mechanisms.
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Nazir P. Kherani

Professor
Electrical & Computer Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering
Microstructural Surface Design and Control

Kherani’s expertise embraces photovoltaic materials, photonics and electronic devices. He brings considerable understanding and practical experience in the design and synthesis of light harvesting opto-electronic materials and devices, invaluable for the development of solar fuels materials and photoreactors.
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Zheng-Hong Lu

Professor
Materials Science & Engineering

Lu’s expertise includes science and engineering of metal-metal oxides heterostructures and energetics of molecules on oxide surfaces. He will lead a team focusing on fabricating and determining the energies of molecules on catalyst surfaces and on the electronic structures at catalyst heterojunctions.
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