Expert on nanoporous materials and chemical separations joins UB

An internationally recognized expert on nanoporous materials and chemical separations has joined UB’s RENEW Institute and the faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Miao Yu will serve as an Empire Innovation Professor in RENEW — an interdisciplinary institute dedicated to research and education on globally pressing problems in energy, environment and water — and in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE).

His appointment was announced by RENEW Director Amit Goyal and Kemper Lewis, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who said in a joint statement that Yu “will boost UB's position as a premier public research university and will significantly impact the RENEW Institute.”

Yu’s work aligns with RENEW's Next-Generation Materials & Technologies for Energy, Environment, & Water Sustainability focus area.

Sustainable energy, environment, water and food, to a large extent, depend on the ability to acquire, capture and utilize small molecules of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane, ethanol and liquid hydrocarbons. Precisely designing stable, molecular-scale pores for sieving these valuable molecules — either from the final product or during their production processes — could be an effective way of acquiring these molecules. Considering the very small sizes — less than a nanometer — of these molecules and the tiny size difference from their contaminants and/or byproducts, it is challenging to design these molecular-scale pores, especially using stable and desired materials. 

One of the most important research directions of Yu's group is CO₂ capture and utilization. He is leading or taking part in three Department of Energy (DOE) projects on CO₂ capture from both flue gas and air, and two DOE projects on CO₂ conversion to liquid fuels.

Yu’s long-term goals are to commercialize technologies developed from his research to impact energy, environment, water and food through the design of novel and scalable functional nanoporous materials and structures. This work is guided by deep fundamental understanding of materials synthesis and growth mechanisms, and their structure and property relationship. 

Prior to joining UB, Yu was an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He served as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Carolina from 2012-17, and an assistant research professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 2010-12.

Yu has published about 70 peer-reviewed papers — two in Science and others in Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Nano Letters, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, ACS Catalysis, Chemical Communications, among others. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015, and has secured roughly $20 million in research funds.

Yu has transferred four DOE research grants totaling more than $2 million to UB. Earlier this month, the DOE awarded approximately $2 million from its new Advanced Manufacturing Office program to E2H2Nano, Yu's startup company, to explore ammonia synthesis, with a subcontract to UB of roughly $500,000.

Yu received a PhD in chemical engineering from University of Colorado, Boulder in 2007, and an MS in chemical engineering Tianjin University, China, in 2002. He was as a postdoctoral researcher at Boulder from 2007-10.