UCLA Chemical Engineer Receives Award for Carbon Capture Materials

Yuzhang Li, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award in support of research to develop a new class of carbon capture materials.

Li and two colleagues each received a $50,000 grant for research to scale up the development of carbon-adsorbent materials with surfaces to which carbon dioxide can adhere well. The trio is one of seven multidisciplinary teams awarded through the Scialog: Negative Emissions Science (NES) program. Now in its fourth and final year, the Scialog NES initiative supports collaborative research into novel technologies to remove, sequester and utilize greenhouse gasses. It is co-sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and ClimateWorks Foundation.

A member of the UCLA Samueli faculty since 2020, Li directs the Li Research Group, which explores electrochemical systems that will play a major role in renewable energy, sustainability and global climate change. For the Scialog research, he will be joined by Benjamin Snyder, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Caroline Saouma, an associate professor of chemistry at Virginia Tech.

Scialog, short for “science + dialog,” was created by RCSA in 2010 to support collaborative and interdisciplinary research. Li’s other recent honors include a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship and early career awards from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society and The Electrochemical Society.