Vladimir Michaelis, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been awarded the 2019 Petro Canada Young Innovator Award for his materials research. Photo credit: John Ulan
Picture the size of a football field. Now, imagine that surface area on a sugar cube.
Fantastic though it may seem, the porous catalytic materials that Vladimir Michaelis studies can be described this way. And while these materials are of critical importance, providing essential chemical and petrochemical resources, they're difficult to study-as one might imagine.
"Insight into the structure of these complex catalytic environments is a challenging feat," explained Michaelis, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry. "In fact, the 'action site' where the catalytic reaction takes place is often one atom per 100." Since joining the University of Alberta's Faculty of Science in January 2016, Michaelis has become a force in the world of materials science and physical chemistry-from making groundbreaking discoveries to applying new technology to get faster, more accurate results.
"Our research has historically been related to advancing next-generation materials for health and energy," said Michaelis. "One of the challenges is that because catalytic materials are so complex and the catalytic site is so dilute, many of the spectroscopic techniques lack the sensitivity and selectivity to provide a clear picture of where the action happens."
Enter a new approach to studying catalysts that is 100 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than traditional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy: dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP).
"DNP allows us to probe the interactions between atoms in a more profound way," explained Michaelis. "It allows us to identify what's really going on at the atomic-level, greater than one million times smaller than a human hair. For the science and engineering communities, this emerging technique is rapidly breaking down previous barriers in the field".
In recognition of his innovative and inspired approach to research, Michaels has become the most recent winner of the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, a prize designed to recognize early-career researchers who are developing new streams of chemical and petrochemical ability. The honour, administered by UAlberta, comes with an unrestricted $10,000 research fund. For Michaelis, this funding will go toward supporting a graduate student through a year of research, as well as some of the practical necessities, like purchasing new isotopes and cryogens to get this research off the ground.
"The award also means a lot," said Michaelis. "This is $10,000 that can go right back into the research, unrestricted, which allows us to take more risks than we might have been able to explore without it. It means that we're doing something right-that our research is at the forefront and our team is trying to get to the next level."