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Radical Approaches to Renewable and Sustainable Energy Challenges

The depletion of petroleum resources, alongside climate change and plastic pollution, has prompted the global need to transition to sustainable and renewable resources for energy and chemical production. Our lab is tackling these challenges by developing base metal catalysts that replace noble transition metals in pharmaceutical synthesis. These catalysts not only reduce costs but also enhance the sustainability of complex chemical production processes. Moreover, we have developed strategies based on radical reactivity to harness the chemical energy of biomass and plastic waste. Lignin, a major component of biomass and the most abundant renewable aromatic feedstock, is currently underutilized, being landfilled or burned as a low-value fuel. To address this issue, we have developed a titanium catalyst that reverses lignin biosynthesis, converting it into monolignols—valuable building blocks for fragrances, pesticides, and synthetic precursors. In response to the global plastic waste crisis, we have developed a “doping” strategy that facilitates the depolymerization of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), a widely used alternative to glass. Additionally, in collaboration with chemical engineers, we are exploring methods to convert natural gas into high-value chemical feedstocks by activating it into a low-temperature plasma within microfluidic reactors. These approaches are unified by our focus on leveraging the reactivity of radicals to discover novel chemical transformations. 

Biography

Tianning Diao is a Professor of Chemistry at New York University (NYU). She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2012, followed by postdoctoral research at Princeton University from 2012 to 2014. Since her appointment at NYU in 2014, Diao's research has been focused on understanding the mechanisms of nickel-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions and developing new methodologies to address challenges in organic synthesis and sustainable energy conversion. Diao is the recipient of multiple awards, including the NSF-CAREER award (2016), Sloan Research Fellowship (2018), Chinese-American Chemistry Professors Association Distinguished Junior Faculty Award (2018), Organometallics Distinguished Author Award (2018), Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2019), and the Cope Scholar Award (2023).