ARC 2021 Giannis Mpourmpakis Abstract and Biography
Abstract
Design of Thermodynamically Stable Bimetallic Nanoparticles
Nanomaterials, such as metal nanoparticles find tremendous applications in numerous and diverse areas, including medicine, catalysis, energy, and the environment. Despite these applications, the fundamentals of nanoparticle properties are yet to be elucidated and any discoveries have relied on trial and error experimentation in the lab. For example, it is currently unknown how nanoparticle stability changes as a function of nanoparticle size, shape and metal composition. In this work, we blend first-principles calculations with computational modeling and machine learning to develop models able to capture thermodynamic stability and mixing properties of bimetallic nanoparticles of any morphology (size/shape) and metal composition. Our models, which take into consideration atomic level chemical bonding information of metal nanoparticles, are universal, rapid and able to capture a large number of computational and experimental data. Overall, we demonstrate a methodology to accelerate the discovery of nanomaterials by rapidly screening bimetallic nanoparticles and identifying ones with enhanced thermodynamic stability.
Biography
Giannis Mpourmpakis, PhD, is an associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD from the Chemistry Department, at the University of Crete (Greece) and he was a Marie-Curie fellow and Senior Researcher in the Chemical Engineering Department, at the University of Delaware. His research focuses on the first-principles-based multiscale modeling of nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications. He has published more than 100 research articles in high impact journals. He has received several awards, such as the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2017) and the 2019 Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientist Prize (biannual Prize awarded to the best Greek scientist around the world bellow the age of 40) and he has been highlighted as “Emerging Investigator” by the ACS Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data (2018) and as an emerging scholar in “Futures” by AIChE (2020). For his contributions to education, Prof. Mpourmpakis was awarded the 2016 James Pommersheim Award for Excellence in Teaching in Chemical Engineering by the University of Pittsburgh. He has been serving as the President of the Pittsburgh-Cleveland Catalysis Society and he has organized several scientific sessions at national and international meetings (AIChE, ACS, NACS, and others).