PhD Thesis Work - Production of Hydrogen Using Nanocrystalline Protein-Templated Catalysts on M13 Phage

My thesis work with Prof Angela Belcher at MIT, in which I developed a unique method of templating inorganic catalyst nanoparticles in the presence of genetically modified M13 Bacteriophage. After synthesis, the resulting templated material was sintered to remove all biological materials, characterized with XPS, XRD, and TEM to identify particle size distribution, thermal stability, surface area, and phase composition. Finally, the materials were tested using an entirely custom chemical reactor designed by Brian using a fuel injector to accurately meter the injection of ethanol to characterize the steam reforming performance of this catalyst.

The approach was licensed and adopted by Siluria (link to archived website as they went out of business ten years later) to investigate the production of ethylene from natural gas using carbon coupling.

“Production of Hydrogen Using Nanocrystalline Protein-Templated Catalysts on M13 Phage” Brian Neltner, Brian Peddie, Alex Xu, William Doenlen, Keith Durand, Dong Soo Yun, Scott Speakman, Andrew Peterson, and Angela Belcher, ACS Nano 2010 4 (6), 3227-3235, DOI: 10.1021/nn100346h