Justin Bui

Decarbonization is not occurring at a sufficient rate to curtail climate change in the increasingly pressing timeframe required to protect our planet from irreversible harm. While immense progress has been made to generate electricity renewably from nature, we urgently need technologies capable of harnessing that green electricity to power and sustain our global economy. Working at the intersection of electrochemistry, polymer science, and reaction engineering, our research group (starting Fall 2026) seeks to meet this need by engineering new electrochemical technologies. We aim to establish models that enable accurate prediction of reactor performance and to synergize those models with additive manufacturing and electroanalytical experiment to accelerate the design, optimization, and intensification of systems required to decarbonize our society and remediate our environment. This approach requires fundamental, basic science understanding of the complex multi-component, multi-phase, and multi-scale transport and electrokinetic phenomena occurring in these systems to intentionally design reactors and interfaces for crucial chemistries. We will apply this methodology broadly to address challenges in decarbonization and environmental remediation, with a specific focus on the following areas:

1. Multi-layer ion-conducting polymer membranes with controlled ion transport and local microenvironments for the electrodialytic separation of ions in aqueous systems (for instance, brine treatment, CO₂ capture, or cement clinker synthesis).
2. Porous electrode reactors capable of mediating multiphase transport of gaseous reagents for high-rate electrochemical oxidations (for instance, nitrogen (N₂) and alkene oxidations).

Collectively, our group’s research can be cast under the umbrella of enabling sustainable transformations of air and water via electrochemistry, wherein careful tailoring of transport and reaction environments facilitates necessary advancements in the activity, selectivity, and durability of the electrochemical processes needed to combat global climate change.