Associate Professor Nicola H. Perry of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering has been awarded a New Directions Grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) for her project "Accelerating Materials Design for Intermediate-Temperature CO2 Capture and Valorization with Combinatorial Thin Film Kinetics Platform."
The ACS PRF New Directions program provides seed funding to established faculty launching entirely new research ventures—offering support even without preliminary results to help investigators demonstrate proof of concept and secure future funding. Perry's CO2 capture project represents a new direction in her research portfolio, addressing fundamental questions about materials chemistry in the petroleum field.
The research also tackles a critical climate challenge: CO2 emissions, like those from industrial petrochemical and power generation processes, contribute to the majority of global warming. Perry's work focuses on developing ceramic materials that capture and transform CO2 from hot flue gas through electrochemical processes—without costly precious metal catalysts.
"These ceramic materials can capture and transform CO2 emissions into value-added chemicals, but little is known about how their composition, extended defects, surface chemistry, and nanostructure impact efficiency and selectivity," Perry explains. Her team will use combinatorial materials synthesis and high-throughput characterization to reveal design principles for these promising CO2-capture electrocatalysts.
This latest award builds on Perry's growing portfolio of sustainability-focused research. In fall 2024, she completed a transformative five-month sabbatical at Imperial College London, funded by the 2023 ACS Principal Investigator Development in Sustainability Grant. During that time, Perry learned advanced characterization techniques for energy materials—including isotope exchanges, atom probe tomography, and ion scattering methods—which she's now implementing in her own lab.
The sabbatical also yielded valuable international partnerships and discussions with researchers at Imperial College, Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya (IREC), and Grenoble-INP in France. "A particular benefit of these new collaborative activities is that my students have become involved in the work and have built their own collaborations with international researchers in that process," Perry notes.
Her research contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals for affordable and clean energy, climate action, and sustainable communities. At Illinois, Perry continues integrating green chemistry principles into her teaching, developing new curriculum modules on sustainable materials and inspiring the next generation of engineers to prioritize environmental considerations in their work.
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Nicola H. Perry is an Illinois Grainger Engineering associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory.