Reception

2024 WIN Research Celebration and Holiday Reception

Ashley Tao — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:59:14 +0000

2024 WIN Research Celebration and Holiday Reception Ashley Tao Thu, 10/24/2024 - 14:59

Join us to celebrate WIN members' outstanding achievements! The Research Celebration will run from 2:00 - 2:45 PM on November 28th in QNC 1501 and will be followed by a Holiday Reception from 3:00 - 5:30 PM in the QNC Basement Atrium. Food will be provided during the reception.

Registration is required for the Holiday Reception. Please RSVP by November 15, 2024:

If you have any questions or issues registering, please contact win-office@uwaterloo.ca.

Event schedule

2:00 PM	Opening remarks and Territorial Acknowledgment by Bernard Duncker, Associate Vice-President, Research and International	QNC 1501
2:05 PM	Opening remarks by Sushanta Mitra, WIN Executive Director	QNC 1501
2:10 PM	Award ceremony 2024 WIN Rising Star Award 2024 WIN Research Leader Awards 2024 WIN Volunteer Appreciation Award CWSF 2024 Senior Award Winner 2024 Nanofellowship Winners	QNC 1501
3:00 PM	Holiday reception with poster presentations by 2024 Nanofellowship recipients & CWSF 2024 1st place Senior Student	QNC Atrium

For the full program, please see the 2024 Research Celebration Brochure (PDF).

2023 WIN Research Celebration and Holiday Reception

Asia Dale — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 17:57:01 +0000

2023 WIN Research Celebration and Holiday Reception Asia Dale Thu, 10/19/2023 - 13:57

Join us to celebrate WIN members' outstanding achievements! The research celebration will run from 3:00 - 4:00 PM on November 23rd in QNC 0101 and will be followed by a holiday reception from 4:00 - 5:30 PM in the QNC Basement Atrium.

Please RSVP by November 10, 2023:

If you have any questions or issues registering, please contact win-office@uwaterloo.ca.

Event Program

3:00 PM	Opening remarks and Territorial Acknowledgment: Bernard Duncker, Associate Vice-President, Research and International
3:05 PM	Opening remarks: Sushantra Mitra, WIN Executive Director
3:10 PM	Sushanta Mitra announces 2023 WIN Rising Star
3:15 PM	Sushanta Mitra presents the WIN Staff Appreciation Award
3:20 PM	Sushanta Mitra presents WIN Research Leaders with their awards
4:00 - 5:30 PM	Holiday Reception with Poster Presentations by 2023 Nanofellowship Recipients & CWSF 2023 1st place Senior Student in the QNC Basement

Full Program (PDF)

2022 WIN Research Celebration and Holiday Reception

Kendra Goertz — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 14:29:45 +0000

2022 WIN Research Celebration and Holiday Reception Kendra Goertz Thu, 11/03/2022 - 10:29

Join us to celebrate WIN members' outstanding achievements! The research celebration will run from 4:00 - 5:00pm on December 2nd in QNC 2502 and will be followed by a holiday reception from 5:00 - 6:30pm in the QNC Basement Atrium. Registration for the research celebration and the holiday reception are seperate. Please be sure to register for the event(s) you plan to attend by November 24th, 2022.

Registration is required. If you have any questions or issues registering, please contact win-office@uwaterloo.ca.

Event Program

4:00 PM	Bernard Duncker, Associate Vice-President, Research and International, will bring greetings
4:05 PM	Sushanta Mitra, WIN Executive Director, opening remarks and introduces WIN Rising Star Recipients
4:10 PM	WIN Rising Star 2021 Recipient Cao Thang Dinh, Keynote Presentation
4:45 PM	Sushanta Mitra presents WIN Research Leaders with their awards
4:50 PM	Sushanta Mitra introduces Outstanding Staff Award
5:00 - 6:30 PM	Reception with Poster Presentations by 2022 Nanofellowship Recipients at QNC Basement

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE FULL PROGRAM

Keynote Presentation

Cao Thang Dinh

WIN Rising Star 2021 Recipient

Electrosynthesis of Renewable Fuels and Chemicals

Limiting global warming to 1.5^oC versus pre-industrial levels would imply reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission to net-zero by 2050. To make this happen requires a fast transition of traditional fossil fuels to renewable energy such as wind and solar. While these renewable energies are very abundant, their intermittency requires long-term and large-scale storage solution for further deployment as replacements of fossil fuels. Transition to solar and wind electricity will also need to be accompanied by electrification of our energy sector. While electrifying energy services such as short-distance transport, heating, and cooling can be relatively straightforward, other energy services including aviation, long-distance transport, and cement and steel industries are likely to be more difficult to electrify.

Electrochemical CO₂ reduction (ECR) powered by renewable energy, offers a potential solution to both renewable electricity storage and hard-to-electrify energy services. The ECR process converts CO₂ and water into compounds such as methane, methanol, ethanol, and ethylene, which are essentially the same as the fossil-derived fuels and chemicals. Therefore, products from ECR can be readily integrated into the current infrastructures for storage, transportation, and usage. However, unlike fossil fuels, the fuels from ECR are carbon-neutral because burning them dose not generate new CO₂. Converting CO₂ into chemical feedstock, on the other hand, allows the sequestration of CO₂ into valuable and long-lifetime products such as polymers. This carbon-negative process can offset CO₂ emission from hard-to-decarbonize processes, and thus, enabling a net zero carbon emission.

The ECR technology has received significant interest from both academy and industry over the last decades. In the last five years, the field has moved from traditional aqueous CO₂ reduction system to gas-phase CO₂ electrolysis. This new platform enables orders of magnitude higher current densities (reaction rates) compared to aqueous system, reaching over an Ampere per square centimeter (A/cm²), which is on a par with commercial water electrolyzers for hydrogen production. The gas-phase electrolysis also opens opportunities for exploring new materials and chemistry in CO₂ reduction, leading to significant jumps in selectivity, current density, and energy efficiency - the three important performance metrics in ECR. While these advances have brought ECR closer to practical application and much effort on scaling up this technology is underway, further improvements in ECR performance, especially the stability and energy efficiency, are needed before it can be deployed at large scale.

In this talk, I will discuss how gas-phase CO₂ electrolysis platform has transformed ECR for producing renewable fuels and chemicals. Particularly, I will focus on strategies that combine gas-phase system engineering and material design to advance ECR technology. Finally, I will share my view on what it takes and the path forward for producing renewable fuels and chemicals at industrial scale.

2021 WIN Research Celebration

Isabella McKenzie — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 21:49:07 +0000

2021 WIN Research Celebration Isabella McKenzie Tue, 10/05/2021 - 17:49

Join us virtually on December 2, 2020, to celebrate WIN members' outstanding achievements in research and the winners of our nanofellowships!

Registration is required. If you have any questions or issues registering, please contact win-office@uwaterloo.ca.

Event Program

4:00 PM	Lisa Pokrajac, WIN Assistant Director, Research Programs, welcomes university and other dignitaries present
4:05 PM	Charmaine Dean, Vice-President, Research & International, will bring greetings
4:10 PM	Sushanta Mitra, WIN Executive Director, opening remarks and introduces WIN Rising Star Recipients
4:15 PM	WIN Rising Star Recipient Babak Anasori, Professor at Purdue University, Acceptance Speech
4:20 PM	WIN Rising Star Recipient Chao Thang Dinh, Professor at Queen's University, Acceptance Speech
4:25 PM	Sushanta Mitra presents WIN Research Leaders with their awards
4:40 PM	Recognition to individuals who were presented with a WIN Nanofellowship

Click here to download the event program which has the full celebration details including Rising Star awardees' biographies, Research Leaders' biographies and a list of the 2021 WIN Nanofellowship awardees.

To accommodate for the inability to have a reception after the celebration, as we would in other years, the Nanofellowship recipients will be creating video versions of their research presentations. These videos will be available on WIN's YouTube channel for viewing after the event.

WIN Research Celebration

Isabella McKenzie — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 20:31:19 +0000

WIN Research Celebration Isabella McKenzie Tue, 10/13/2020 - 16:31

Join us virtually on November 24, 2020 to celebrate WIN members' outstanding achievements in research, the winners of our nanofellowships and listen to lectures by our 2020 Rising Star recipients!

Registration is required. If you have any questions or issues registering, please contact win-office@uwaterloo.ca.

Event Program

10:00AM-10:05AM	Greetings Lisa Pokrajac, WIN Assistant Director, Research Programs, WIN
10:05AM-10:10AM	Greetings Charmaine Dean, Vice President Research & International, U��ݮ��Ƶ
10:10AM-10:15AM	Welcoming remarks and introduction of WIN Rising Star recipients Sushanta Mitra, Executive Director, WIN
10:15AM-11:00AM	Keynote lecture by WIN Rising Star Recipient Robert Hoye, Professor at London Imperial College 'Defect Tolerant Semiconductors for Clean Energy Harvesting – Nanomanufacturing and Emerging Materials' Photovoltaics produce clean electricity from sunlight and are one of the critical renewable technologies for achieving net-zero emissions targets and fulfilling UN Sustainable Development Goals on affordable and clean energy. Although silicon has become the most widely used photovoltaic material, its efficiency has approached its fundamental limit. Furthermore, many of the new consumers of energy will be small autonomous devices part of the Internet of Things ecosystem. Although solar cells are regarded as an ideal way to power these devices, silicon does not have the optimum band gap for indoor light harvesting. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a new class of lead-halide perovskites, which have rapidly increased in efficiency in photovoltaic devices. A critical enabling factor is the tolerance of the halide perovskites to defects, enabling long charge carrier lifetimes to be achieved despite high densities of defects when the materials are manufactured at low-temperature using simple solution-based methods. These halide perovskites have wider band gaps than silicon and can be combined together with silicon devices in tandem photovoltaics that could exceed the efficiency limits of single-junction silicon solar cells. However, the toxicity of the water-soluble lead component of halide perovskites is a potential barrier to large-scale adoption. The first part of this talk examines scalable nanomanufacturing methods for perovskite-silicon tandem devices. Specifically, atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (AP-CVD) is put forward as an alternative to solution processing, thermal evaporation and atomic layer deposition for growing the thin (~10 nm) inorganic buffer layer. This is critical for protecting the lead-halide perovskite absorber and organic charge transport layers from mechanical damage when the transparent top electrode is deposited by sputtering. We show that AP-CVD grows pinhole-free n-type and p-type oxides within minutes without vacuum. But the soft deposition results in negligible damage to the perovskite, and the highly dense oxide layers reduce leakage current, leading to improved efficiency [1,2]. The second part of this talk examines bismuth-based semiconductors as a non-toxic and air-stable alternative to lead-halide perovskites. We demonstrate through computations and experiment that bismuth oxyiodide (BiOI) replicates the defect tolerance of the lead-halide perovskites [3,4]. BiOI has a band gap of 1.9 eV, which is suitable for top-cells in tandems with silicon, and we achieve devices with up to 80% external quantum efficiency at 450 nm wavelength [3]. Moreover, the band gap of BiOI is ideal for indoor light harvesting, and we show that the BiOI solar cells are already comparable to hydrogenated amorphous silicon (the industry standard) under indoor lighting. We discuss the current limiting factors for BiOI solar cells and how efficiencies could be improved in the future, as well as the potential of the broader perovskite-inspired materials family for indoor light harvesting.
11:00AM-11:45AM	Keynote lecture by WIN Rising Star Recipient Drew Higgins, Professor at McMaster University 'Electrocatalyst development for electrochemical CO₂ conversion into fuels and chemicals and future research needs for this technology' For electrochemical energy conversion and storage technologies to become viable component of future sustainable energy infrastructures, the development of catalysts that are active, selective, stable and inexpensive is required. The first portion of this talk will focus on catalysts for electrochemical reduction of CO₂ to produce industrially relevant fuels and chemicals. While these products are generally fossil fuel derived, electrochemical CO₂ reduction (CO₂R) provides opportunity to use renewable energy (i.e., wind, solar, hydro) as the energy input to achieve a carbon-neutral artificial photosynthesis process. This talk will introduce the concept and fundamentals underlying electrochemical CO₂ reduction. The talk will then highlight recent work on the development of nanostructured carbon catalysts containing atomically dispersed nickel-nitrogen-carbon (Ni-N-C) active sites for the conversion to CO₂ into carbon monoxide, including their synthesis, characterization, and activity/selectivity evaluation. A discussion of the remaining challenges facing electrochemical CO₂R technology development will then be provided.
11:45AM-11:55AM	Recognition of WIN Research Leader with their awards Sushanta Mitra, Executive Director, WIN
11:55AM-12:00PM	Recognition of 2020 WIN Nanofellowship recipients Sushanta Mitra, Executive Director, WIN