The U.S. Department of Energy has selected Siddarth Krishna, the Duane H. and Dorothy M. Bluemke Assistant Professor in chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to receive a 2026 DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program award.
The award provides $875,000 in support over five years for outstanding early-career scientists at U.S. academic institutions and DOE national laboratories. The goal of these awards is to stimulate new research that has the potential to deliver the fundamental scientific discoveries and major scientific tools needed to transform our understanding of nature and advance the energy, economic and national security of the United States.
In his research, Krishna aims to better understand the mechanisms of reduction-oxidation, or ‘redox’, reactions during catalysis. Redox reactions are key to manufacturing many chemicals society relies upon, including those used to make plastics, adhesives, solvents, fuels, and many other critical materials. Understanding these reactions on a molecular level could help researchers design new, more efficient catalysts for advanced chemical manufacturing and reduce the need for toxic chemicals and expensive metals, like palladium, currently used in many industrial redox reactions. “The key question is, can we gain a new degree of control over redox behavior in solid catalysts to enable efficient new reaction processes?” says Krishna. “Ultimately, we aim to discover translatable molecular-level insights that are beneficial to industry and society.”
Catalysts are materials that, when added to a chemical system, speed up or initiate new types of reactions. In many cases, complex reactions require interactions between metal centers—the atom or ion in a catalyst where a reaction takes place—sometimes requiring them to migrate on the nanoscale to facilitate key steps such as electron transfer.
For many years, the dynamic interactions between molecules and catalyst surfaces were essentially a black box; researchers did not have the tools to observe the changes taking place during catalysis. Using state-of-the-art tools such as operando, or ‘in operation,’ synchrotron X-ray spectroscopy combined with mechanistic and kinetic experiments, however, Krishna and his students hope to directly observe and learn from the process.
“Reaction dynamics are quite difficult to study since they are happening on a molecular scale, and often only occur in the presence of the reaction environment,” says Krishna. “One of the themes in this project is trying to study and ultimately control the dynamic redox interactions between metal ions during the reaction. Our philosophy is that if we can understand those behaviors, including both desired dynamics that promote the reaction and undesired dynamics that degrade the catalytic components, then we can rationally engineer the catalyst material and its reaction environment to select for desired reaction pathways.”
To do this, Krishna and his team will mimic known redox reactions using zeolites, which are a type of porous inorganic material that can anchor metal ions. These materials also provide a number of tunable parameters, such as pore structure and the proximity of active sites, to control the reaction microenvironment. The goal is to develop a rulebook for these transformations that can then be used to improve and customize various catalytic redox reactions, and perhaps enable new reactions that were previously not possible, for more energy-efficient chemical manufacturing.
“This award is transformative for our group,” says Krishna. “We will be able to build on our initial findings in multi-site catalysis to ultimately gain a new degree of control over complex redox chemistries for societally relevant energy applications. We are deeply grateful to the Department of Energy Office of Science Basic Energy Sciences for this recognition.”
Featured image of Siddarth Krishna by Joel Hallberg.