Friday, April 28th, 2023 Ismaila Dabo on Data-Intensive Discovery of Earth-Abundant Semiconductors for Solar-to-Hydrogen Conversion

Penn State Professor Ismaila Dabo will speak on Data-Intensive Discovery of Earth-Abundant Semiconductors for Solar-to-Hydrogen Conversion. Renewable and sustainable solar generation of hydrogen is pivotal to diversifying the global energy supply away from fossil fuels in the transportation sector and across major branches of the industry, including ammonia synthesis, process metallurgy, and hydrocarbon production. While photovoltaics and electrolysis are increasingly mature technologies whose association may ultimately offer a viable path to produce hydrogen at scale, there is increasing debate over building a future hydrogen infrastructure that would massively rely on critical Pt-group metals and on photovoltaic devices, whose supply chains and global markets are largely controlled by non-domestic producers. Thus, there is strategic interest in developing novel classes of scalable semiconductors that can directly cleave water into oxygen and hydrogen under solar illumination by photocatalytic means. This presentation will discuss the use of data-intensive materials discovery workflow for narrowing down the choice of candidate semiconductors for solar hydrogen generation. Progress in predicting the optical properties of compound semiconductors will also be highlighted.

Ismaila Dabo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State University with joint appointments in the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment, and in the Penn State Materials Research Institute. He received a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT in 2008, working under the supervision of Nicola Marzari on the first-principles modeling of electrochemical solid–liquid interfaces. His recent awards include the Wilson Teaching Excellence Award (2021), Materials Science and Engineering Faculty of the Year Award (2021), Corning Chair in Materials Science and Engineering (2020). He currently serves on the editorial board of the journals Computational Materials Science (Elsevier) and Science (AAAS).