Doctorate for Yujie Peng
Yujie Peng defended her doctoral thesis at Technische Universität Berlin. She elucidated how surface structure, local chemical environment, and applied potential govern the in situ activation and structural evolution of copper- and cobalt-based electrocatalysts.
Electrocatalysis offers a sustainable route to convert intermittent renewable energy into value-added chemicals and fuels while mitigating pollutants such as CO2 and NO3-, yet its practical implementation is limited by challenges in selectivity, activity, and long-term stability. These limitations arise from catalyst surface restructuring under reaction conditions, which can generate catalytic active sites but also compromise stability.
Moreover, such dynamic transformations imply that post-reaction characterization is insufficient in order to gain insight into the catalytically relevant structures, necessitating in situ surface-sensitive techniques with high spatial resolution to directly link structural evolution with catalytic performance.
Ms. Yujie Peng did her research within the Interface Science Department headed by Prof. Beatriz Roldan Cuenya in the Photo-Electrochemical Scanning Probe Microscopy Group lead by Dr. Christopher Kley.
“The scientific results presented are outstanding, combining state-of-the-art, highly-sophisticated measurements on advanced catalyst systems”, says enthusiastically her PhD supervisor, Prof. Dr. Beatriz Roldan Cuenya. “All data included in her thesis are of the highest scientific standards, with very careful attention to a rigorous corroboration of results with control experiments and reproducibility studies.”
“Yujie Peng addresses key challenges using well-defined model systems combined with in situ electrochemical atomic force microscopy (EC-AFM) and spectroscopy”, Dr. Kley adds. “By establishing direct correlations between surface restructuring and catalytic performance her thesis advances a mechanistic, non-static understanding of electrocatalyst behavior”.
The complete title of Yujie Peng’s dissertation is “In situ Structural Evolution of Transition Metal-Based Electrocatalysts Probed by Electrochemical Atomic Force Microscopy”.
