Tengfei Li

Research Interests

The global environmental and energy crisis demands transitions in modern synthetic industries from dependence on fossil fuels to sustainable solutions and developing new strategies to replace fossil-derived feedstocks with alternative carbon sources. Electrocatalysis and photocatalysis have emerged as promising techniques to drive redox reactions by clean electrons instead of toxic or expensive reagents and enable mild reaction conditions. Electro- and photo-chemical upgrading of waste materials, greenhouse gases and pollutants (e.g. plastic, CO₂, NO_x species) to value-added products is particularly attractive, as it not only stores the abundant and intermittent clean energy as useful chemicals, but can also utilize waste compounds, instead of fossil fuels, as the feedstocks for chemical synthesis.

The Li group is working on the development of electrocatalysis and photocatalysis systems to convert waste compounds into valuable chemical fuels and feedstocks. There are three main research directions in our lab:

• Building C–N bonds via electrochemical NO_x reduction and ammonia oxidation, including electroreduction of nitrate, nitrite & R-NO₂, organic electrosynthesis, co-reduction of NO_x & CO₂, and electrochemical ammonia oxidation.
• Electrochemical CO₂ reduction, including electrocatalyst development, flow reactor design, and integrated CO₂ capture and electrolysis.
• Photo/electrochemical upcycling of waste plastic into small-molecule feedstocks, including degradation, oxygenation, and amination of polyolefins.

I am actively recruiting PhD and undergraduate students to join our research. Members of the Li group will receive systematic trainings in the areas of energy, materials and sustainability, such as (i) preparation (e.g., electrodeposition, hydrothermal synthesis, glove-box, Schlenk techniques) and characterization (e.g., SEM, TEM, XRD, XPS) of catalyst materials, (ii) analysis of the electrosynthesis products (e.g., NMR, HPLC, GC), (iii) design of novel electrocatalysis and photocatalysis reaction systems, (iv) mechanistic understandings of the catalyst-electrolyte interface via electrochemistry techniques (e.g., CV, EIS) and operando spectroscopies (e.g., in-situ Raman, ATR-IR, UV-Vis, DEMS), and (iv) development of upscaled reactors that are relevant to industrial implementation.