The Catalyst Review August 2019 - 18

MOVERS & SHAKERS
Bryan Hunter, PhD

Principal Investigator at the Rowland Institute-Hunter Lab, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA
Bryan Hunter graduated from Yale University in 2008, simultaneously receiving his BS and MS degrees in Chemistry,
having worked in the research lab of Gary Brudvig. He went on to receive his PhD at Caltech, working under Harry
B. Gray and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Davis with R. David Britt. Hunter also holds a Master's
degree in Education and taught high school chemistry in Los Angeles for two years. While at Caltech, Bryan studied
the mechanism of water oxidation by heterogeneous, earth-abundant catalysts. He was an NSF Graduate Research
Fellow and a Fellow of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech. His doctoral thesis was awarded the 2019
Nobel Laureate Signature Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator
Award, the 2017 Dow Sustainability Innovation Challenge Award, the Herbert Newby McCoy Award for Outstanding Contributions
to the Science of Chemistry, and the Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis Prize in Environmentally Benign Renewable Energy Sources. Bryan
was a 2004 United States Presidential Scholar from California. He can be reached at bhunter@rowland.harvard.edu.

The Catalyst Review asked Dr. Hunter to share his insights into new catalyst developments in the design
of electrolyzers as energy sources.
There are a variety of reasons that it would be advantageous to move from petroleum-based energy to renewables.
Environmental concerns may be the most commonly cited in recent years, but there are economic and national
security benefits associated with relying on sources which are not depleted or subject to "supply and demand"
forces.
In recent years tremendous progress has been made harnessing solar power to produce chemical fuels. The cost of
durable photovoltaics has fallen dramatically, and catalysts for water electrolyzers have improved to the point that
cheap hydrogen fuel is within sight. In my graduate research, new mechanisms for the nickel/iron-catalyzed oxidation of water were discovered, and better catalysts were synthesized using this insight. These materials are of high
interest as they are earth-abundant and among the best catalysts discovered for the anode compartments of water
electrolyzers.
Unfortunately, nearly 30% of the annual global energy use is consumed in industrial processes, from manufacturing
value-added chemicals and pharmaceuticals to reducing nitrogen to ammonia for fertilizer. Many of these reactions
are high-temperature and -pressure processes, for which simple photovoltaics are not necessarily appropriate.
In my lab at the Rowland Institute, we are developing custom catalysts for use in the electrolyzer, which we hope
will provide low-temperature and ambient-pressure analogs for large-scale industrial reactions. These advanced
materials could be used in existing architectures to perform a variety of transformations, incuding: nitrogen reduction, for ammonia synthesis; carbon dioxide reduction, to produce carbon-based chemical fuels; and hydrocarbon
oxidation to produce complex molecules from CO2.
We are using a technology developed in our lab, known as pulsed laser synthesis (PuLS), to synthesize these complex catalyst materials using high-powered laser pulses focused in a variety of liquids. Carbides and nitrides, which
have been predicted to be fantastic catalysts, are generally difficult to synthesize quickly and reproducibly. With our
technique, simply tuning the laser power, focal point, and excitation wavelength provides fine control over the size
and composition of the synthesized materials.
As we refine this technique, partnerships with industry are inevitable and critical. In my opinion, academic labs
are often working orthogonally with respect to the efforts of industry. By better aligning academic research with
real-world problems, we can revolutionize processes, some of which have been unchanged for hundreds of years.
As a result, we are supremely interested in working with industry to design, test, and implement novel catalysts for
a wide range of relevant reactions. Our capabilities include PuLS synthesis, high-T high-P synthesis, electrochemical
characterization, and a complete suite of materials characterization methods (e.g., XRD, XPS, micro-Raman).
I encourage industrial engineers and scientists to reach out to academic labs with shared interests and let us know
the most pressing problems in your field. By working on these problems together, our collective advances will have
the potential for global impact.

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August 2019

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The Catalyst Review August 2019

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