By: Ashley Hellman

Hello! My name is Ashley Hellman, and I am a fourth year PhD student in the chemistry department at USC. I work in Professor Smaranda Marinescu’s lab, where we focus on sustainable energy storage and applications.

Specifically, my research focuses on the reduction of carbon dioxide, or CO2, to carbon monoxide, or CO. CO2 is one of the most abundant greenhouse gases; due to human activity such as burning fossil fuels for energy, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing rapidly in the last few centuries, leading to ocean acidification and global warming.

Graph showing the steep increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration over the last few decades. The current level, which is over 400 parts per million (ppm), is the highest it’s been in 3 million years. Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

While the issue of actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere is not an easy one to tackle, an alternative process is converting unwanted CO2 into other value-added products before it reaches the atmosphere, reducing our annual emissions. By converting CO2 into CO, we can ultimately create renewable energy from something that is otherwise detrimental to the environment.

For the past four years, I have focused on creating catalysts to aid in the electrochemical conversion of CO2 to CO. While the first four catalysts I made did not perform as efficiently as many in the literature, we learned a lot about this class of rhenium bipyridine compounds. This summer, as a Wrigley Sonosky Fellow, I have been focusing on the synthesis of several new catalysts; taking what we learned from my previous work, we are studying new rhenium bipyridine catalysts, and hopefully the efficiency of the conversion and the amount of CO produced will increase! There are so many possible CO2 reduction catalysts out there left to be discovered – maybe one of them will be the key to turning CO2 into renewable energy!

If you’d like to know more about our research, please visit our group website at http://marinescu.usc.edu/. Thanks for reading!