Cocoro Nagasaka was 13 years old when the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, leading to the Fukushima nuclear accident. Nagasaka — who lived in Chiba Prefecture, Japan at the time — was in class and remembers evacuating the school grounds due to the earthquake. In the weeks that followed, he, along with others in the country, experienced hours of planned outages.
“It was obviously a very big deal, not just because of the environmental radiation but also the real need for energy,” said Nagasaka, a Ph.D. student studying chemistry and chemical biology in the Velázquez Lab at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Nagasaka’s experience directly inspired his desire to work at the interface of environmental and energy sciences. And now he’s continuing his research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, through the prestigious U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.
Awardees in the SCGSR program work on research projects that address critical energy challenges at national and international scales. Nagasaka is among 75 Ph.D. students selected to participate in the program this year.
“This is a really great opportunity,” Nagasaka said. “These programs provide a lot of opportunities, not just to me but to so many students, to expand their research.”
Small changes, big impacts
Our air is in dire need of a cleanup. Excess carbon dioxide lingers at levels of roughly 427 parts per million, a far cry away from the preindustrial averages of 280 parts per million.
Electrochemistry could be a particularly useful tool for removing this excess carbon dioxide, and that’s the focus of Nagasaka’s research.
“Carbon dioxide is a problem and with electrochemistry, we can actually convert that into more useful products like formate and methanol, which is really useful for energy storage and conversion,” he said.
While that’s the big picture idea, Nagasaka is optimizing the catalyst materials that kickstart this CO2 conversion process. He’s interested in a class of highly tunable, inorganic materials called Chevrel phase compounds.
“You can plug and play with specific elements in their structures,” Nagasaka explained. “My research is really about synthesizing these materials and investigating how small changes — such as through their structure, the composition of the elements in the framework — shift the material’s electronic character.”
“The investigations that we do are at the basis of understanding why these changes can impact the catalysis,” he added.
But Nagasaka and his colleagues are facing a roadblock. The surface where this catalysis process occurs currently escapes observation.
“It’s really hard to understand what is binding to the surface and what type of intermediates are forming in these reactions that we care about,” he said.
Over the next year at LLNL, Nagasaka will assist in developing a promising technique called attenuated total reflectance surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy, or ATR-SEIRAS. He'll work with LLNL staff scientist Christopher Hahn.
“This will provide us with a way to monitor that surface while catalysis is happening, to really understand the mechanisms a little bit more and to provide more data on how we can actually change the composition to promote the binding that we want to see on the surface,” he said.
A case for basic science
For Nagasaka, his research emphasizes the importance of the iterative nature of science, especially foundational science.
“In order to understand more complex things—which our society, our chemistry, our science is really complex—it’s really important to understand that fundamental and foundational side, so we can build up to those more complex issues,” he said. “Fundamental work is what really propels understanding of significant issues and significant challenges that our society faces.”
Having the opportunity to pursue research work at LLNL reminded Nagasaka why he decided to pursue Ph.D. studies at UC Davis in the first place. Not only was he enthusiastic about research in the Velázquez Lab, but he relished that the university was close in the proximity to national labs and facilities with high quality instrumentation.
“That was really attractive to me compared to some of the other universities on the west coast,” he said.
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