Electron microscopy diagnostics of oxide catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction

Functional oxide catalysts are highly sensitive to boundary/surface/interface conditions, which are expected to dominate the overall response when sizes are reduced into the nanoscale. In this talk, a thorough analysis of the active sites of promising perovskite catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) will be detailed. The approach to diagnose on the very atomic scale their functionalities proceeds with a range of different state-of-art transmission electron microscopy (TEM) methodologies including negative spherical aberration imaging (NCSI) to extract microstructure information, electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) coupled with density functional theory calculations to deduct chemistry transformations, and environmental TEM for real-time observation of the oxygen evolution reaction.

Bio: Vaso Tileli is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL working on the fundamental aspects of nanoscale physicochemical phenomena in functional materials revealed by in situ electron microscopy techniques. She received her PhD in 2009 from the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at University at Albany, SUNY NY, while working on electron beam/specimen interactions in electromagnetic fields in the presence of gases. She joined as a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow the Department of Materials at Imperial College London for the development and application of advanced microscopy techniques for functional oxide materials. More recently she spent time at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London working on electron characterization of hybrid and/or 2D structures.