Prof. Aditya Bhan received his Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech.) in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 2000 and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University in 2005. From January 2005 to August 2007, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and since then he has been on the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science faculty at the University of Minnesota where he currently serves as a Distinguished McKnight University Professor. He leads a research group focused on mechanistic characterization of catalysts useful in energy conversion and petrochemical synthesis. His group at the University of Minnesota has been recognized with the Paul H. Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis by the North American Catalysis Society, the Young Researcher Award from the Acid-Base Catalysis Society, the Ipatieff Prize from the American Chemical Society, and the NSF and DOE early career awards. He serves as Editor for Journal of Catalysis and has served as Chair of the ACS Catalysis Science & Technology Division. It is our pleasure to welcome Prof. Bhan to PodCAT!

Prof. Friederike C. Jentoft studied Chemistry at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen and at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where she earned her Dr. rer. nat. (1994) under the guidance of Helmut Knözinger. After working as a postgraduate researcher in Bruce Gates’ group at the University of California in Davis, she led a research group in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry for 12 years at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. In 2008, she assumed a faculty position at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where she was named Anadarko Petroleum Corporation Presidential Professor in 2014. Since 2015, she has been Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Jentoft received a Young Scientists Prize from the International Association of Catalysis Societies (2000), the Excellence in Catalysis Award from the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York (2018), and a Lady Davis Fellowship from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (2021). She is a Fellow of the AIChE. From 2009 to 2015, she served as an editor of Advances in Catalysis.

Jentoft’s research focuses on acid-base catalysis and redox chemistry of Group V-VII transition metals. Her laboratory applies reaction analysis and kinetics, in situ spectroscopy, and calorimetry to understand surface reactions and improve catalysts and processes. It is our pleasure to welcome Prof. Jenthoft to PodCAT!

Prof. Mark A. Barteau holds the Charles D. Holland Chair at Texas A&M University, with appointments in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry. He received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford working with Professor Robert. J. Madix. He was an NSF Post-doctoral Fellow at the Technische Universität München with Professor Dietrich Menzel, before joining the University of Delaware in 1982. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Delaware, the University of Michigan, and Texas A&M University, as well as visiting appointments at the University of Pennsylvania the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006, and the National Academy of Inventors in 2018.

Dr. Barteau’s research, presented in more than 260 publications and a similar number of invited lectures, focuses on chemical reactions at solid surfaces and their applications in heterogeneous catalysis and energy processes. He is known for the application of surface science techniques to understand reaction mechanisms and site requirements on metal oxide surfaces, and for combined experimental and computational studies of ethylene epoxidation. In addition to his scientific publications he has contributed a number of perspectives on energy, environment, economics, and policy to The Conversation, Fortune, and NPR, among other media outlets.

Dr. Barteau has also served in a number of leadership positions throughout his career, including as Senior Vice Provost for Research and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Delaware, Director of the University of Michigan Energy Institute, and Vice President for Research at Texas A&M. He has served on numerous boards and advisory committees, including the Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; the Governing Board of the Council for Chemical Research; the Chemical Sciences Roundtable (co-chair); the Council of Chemical Sciences of the DOE Office of Science (chair); the Science Advisory Committee of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the science advisory board for the National Institute of Clean and Low-Carbon Energy (NICE) China; and the Board of Directors of NextEnergy in Detroit.

Dr. Barteau was named in 2008 as one of the “100 Engineers of the Modern Era” by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). He is a fellow of both AIChE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received numerous awards, including the 2018 Lawrence K. Cecil Award in Environmental Chemical Engineering, the 2001 Alpha Chi Sigma Award, and the 1991 Allan P. Colburn Award, presented by AIChE; the 1998 International Catalysis Award, presented by the International Association of Catalysis Societies; the 1995 Ipatieff Prize from the American Chemical Society; the Paul H. Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis, given by the North American Catalysis Society, and the 1993 Canadian Catalysis Lecture Tour Award of the Catalysis Division of the Chemical Institute of Canada. He has served as associate editor of the AIChE Journaland WIRES Energy and Environment, and on the editorial boards of a number of other Journals, including Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Researchand the Journal of Catalysis. It is our pleasure to welcome Prof. Barteau to PodCAT!

Prof. John Keith is an R. K. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Energy. After obtaining his Ph.D. from Caltech, he was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ulm and then an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University. He began his independent position at Pitt in September 2013. His group uses first principles-based computational chemistry to study chemical reaction mechanisms for fundamental insights to aid the design of molecular and material catalysts. He received an NSF-CAREER award from CBET Catalysis in 2017 and did a research sabbatical at the University of Luxembourg from 2019-2020. His recent research interests have included mechanistic studies to elucidate electrochemical ozone generation from water, reactive forcefield developments for atomic scale mechanistic studies of corrosion, and the development of new computational methods for broad applications at the confluence of chemistry, materials, and engineering.

Dr. Tracy L. Lohr is Senior Researcher at Shell. She obtained her Ph.D in organometallic catalysis at the University of Calgary. She then pursued a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship with Prof. Tobin J. Marks (in collaboration with Peter C. Stair) at Northwestern University working on heterogeneous catalytic valorization of biomass. She spent over 2 years as a Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern in the Center for Catalysis and Surface Science working in the areas of both homo- and heterogeneous catalysis, with particular focus on tandem catalysis, olefin polymerization, atomic layer deposition, and various heterogeneous oxidative processes. She joined Shell in 2018 where she is currently a Senior Researcher in the Chemical Catalysis Group. She works on the invention, development, and deployment of heterogeneous catalysis technologies.

The opinions expressed in the podcast are Tracy Lohr's and do not necessarily reflect those of Shell.

Prof. Joaquin Resasco was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina. He completed his B.S. at the University of Oklahoma, and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Prof. Alex Bell. At Berkeley, he was an NSF and UC Chancellor’s Fellow. Following his Ph.D., Joaquin was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Prof. Phil Christopher. In 2021, Joaquin became an Assistant Professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Joaquin is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Young Investigator Award, the ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award, the Forbes 30 Under 30, and AIChE’s 35 under 35.

Prof. Jason Adams completed his B.S. at Georgia Tech in 2015, where he studied the fundamentals of gas adsorption and diffusion on nanoporous carbon materials under Bill Koros. He then pursued a PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an NSF graduate fellow under the mentorship of David Flaherty. There, he conducted fundamental studies investigating thermal and electrochemical reactions of hydrogen and oxygen to form hydrogen peroxide over noble metal catalysts, where he graduated in 2022. Afterward, Jason pursued postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Karthish Manthiram to develop automated reactors and elucidate the mechanisms of electrochemical epoxidation of propylene to propylene oxide using water as the O-atom source. As of January 2025, Jason has begun his career as an assistant professor at Rice University, where he is building a group focused on fundamental experimental studies at the interface of electrochemistry, thermal heterogeneous catalysis, and organic chemistry. He aims to develop technologies for decarbonizing chemical industries by low-temperature conversions of commodity chemicals.

Prof. Eranda Nikolla is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, MI. Prior to this, she was a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. She received her received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Michigan in 2009 working with Prof. Suljo Linic and Prof. Johannes Schwank in the area of solid-state high temperature electrocatalysis. She conducted a two-year postdoctoral work at California Institute of Technology with Prof. Mark E. Davis working on designing functionalized silica and zeolite catalysts for selective conversions of biomass derived feedstocks.

Her research interests focus on the development of heterogeneous catalysts and electrocatalysts for chemical and electrochemical energy conversion/storage processes. As an integral part of engineering catalytic structures, Nikolla has implemented a paradigm which involves a combination of controlled synthesis, advanced characterization, kinetic measurements, and quantum chemical calculations to unearth the underlying mechanism that governs their catalytic performance for targeted reactions. Her group’s impact to catalytic science has been recognized through the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Department of Energy Early Career Research Award, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Young Scientist Award from the International Congress on Catalysis, the 2019 ACS Women Chemists Committee (WCC) Rising Star Award, the 2021 Michigan Catalysis Society Parravano Award for Excellence in Catalysis Research and Development, the 2022 ACS Catalysis Lectureship for the Advancement of Catalytic Science, the 2023 Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos Award for Creativity in Catalysis and the 2024 Excellence in Catalysis Award from Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York.