News

Carbon Electrocatalytic Recycling Toronto (CERT), a team composed of researchers from the groups of Prof. Ted Sargent and Prof. David Sinton were just announced as finalists in the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize – a competition to capture and convert the most carbon dioxide into a usable valuable good. 

Team CERT has spent the last year scaling up carbon dioxide reduction reaction technologies from lab to prototype with the help of partners and contractors CO2 Solutions, Ontario Centres of Excellence, and Xerox Research Canada. CERT is 1 of 5 finalists worldwide in the natural gas stream and the only Ontario team to ever advance in an XPrize to the final round. 

You can read about the team here: http://news.engineering.utoronto.ca/cert-team-advances-to-finals-of-carbon-xprize/

CERT website: https://co2cert.com/

CERT Twitter: https://twitter.com/CO2CERT

In a ceremony at the Chinese Consulate in Toronto on April 7th, Ted Sargent congratulated four Sargent Group Winners of the 2017 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Student Abroad.

These included:

• GONG Xiwen, who also won the 2017 Extraordinary Potential Prize worth $10k USD
• LIU Mengxia
• XU Jixian
• LI Jun

 Sargent congratulated fully seven UofT students at the ceremony – UofT students won half of the awards presented at today’s ceremony. He thanked Consul General HE Wei and Education Consul ZHANG Yiqin for holding this beautiful ceremony and for celebrating the achievements of China’s brightest and most dedicated students and researchers.

Ted will be giving a special seminar, “Engineered nanomaterials and devices for light sensing, optical sources, and energy storage” at the Rowland Institute at Harvard on Friday April 13th at 12pm in Pierce 209. 

Abstract:

Innovations in materials chemistry have enabled impressive control over size, monodispersity, shape, and surface chemistry of nanoparticles, including colloidal quantum dots, reduced-dimensional perovskites, and metal nanoparticles. I will discuss advances in photodetectors and infrared cameras (including the story of InVisage

Technologies), solar cells and light emitters, and CO2 reduction electrocatalysts built using control at the nanoscale in such materials.

Mahmoud, Reza, and Mahla publish “Single-cell mRNA cytometry via sequence-specific nanoparticle clustering and trapping” in Nature Chemistry. 

Download Here. 

Congratulations to Prof. Alán Aspuru-Guzik who has recently been announced as one of 20 Canada 150 Research Chairs, announced today by Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan.

Aspuru-Guzik is a tenured professor at Harvard University, world-leading researcher in theoretical and computational chemistry and a Senior Fellow in CIFAR’s Bio-inspired Solar Energy program. He is jointly appointed to the departments of chemistry and computer science as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Theoretical & Quantum Chemistry. This summer, he will arrive at U of T, which is internationally known for its strengths in chemistry and artificial intelligence.

We are excited to welcome Alán. You can read about his story in the Globe and Mail here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-150-research-chairs-draw-scientists-fleeing-trump-guns-and/

Our recent paper in Nature linking the Sargent group and Aspuru-Guzik group on machine learning for materials discovery can be read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07820-6

Science has published a recent interview with PhD student Phil De Luna in an article titled, “Scientists say we’re on the cusp of a carbon dioxide–recycling revolution“. This interview feature was part of larger coverage on a recent paper by PDF Alex Bushuyev and Phil that has been published in Joule. 

You can read the Science interview here, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/scientists-say-we-re-cusp-carbon-dioxide-recycling-revolution

You can read the Joule perspective here, http://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(17)30076-4

Wendi Zhou, an ECE PhD student in the Sargent and Kelley Labs, was recently featured in a Rogers article,”Four trailblazing women in tech” for her work on nanobiosensors for stem cell detection. 

You can read the article here: https://connected.rogers.com/tech-and-gadgets/posts/four-trailblazing-women-in-tech-17660287

Bright colloidal quantum dot light-emitting diodes enabled by efficient chlorination pp159 – 164
    Xiyan Li, Yong-Biao Zhao, Fengjia Fan, Larissa Levina, Min Liu, Rafael Quintero-Bermudez, Xiwen Gong, Li Na Quan, James Fan, Zhenyu Yang, Sjoerd Hoogland, Oleksandr Voznyy, Zheng-Hong Lu & Edward H. Sargent
    DOI: 10.1038/s41566-018-0105-8

Green light-emitting diodes with a brightness of 460,000 cd m–2 and a low turn-on voltage of 2.5 V are enabled by the use of a chlorination treatment to provide conductive passivation of the devices.

Mahla publishes “Profiling circulating tumour cells and other biomarkers of invasive cancers” in Nature Biomedical Engineering