Join us to hear from Joe Zhou from Texas A&M.

Design and synthesis of porous structures with desired pore environments are essential for many energy-related industrial applications, including separation, storage, sensing, and catalysis. Synthetically, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline porous materials that are highly tunable over their components and pore spaces. In addition, the presence of labile or reactive sites, including labile coordination bonds and dynamic covalent bonds, enables the precise tuning of the pore environments mainly at the molecular level. 

His group focuses on the molecular pore engineering of MOFs, the design and synthesis of pores with desired individual and collective pore behaviors, which includes but not limited to the generation of various levels of porosity, the creation of hierarchically porous structures, pore surface modification, pore combination, and pore partition. 

Hong-Cai “Joe” Zhou obtained his Ph.D. in 2000 from Texas A&M University. After a postdoctoral stint at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of Miami University, Oxford in 2002 and was awarded tenure in 2007. He was hired by Texas A&M University in 2008 as a full professor and was promoted to a Davidson Professor of Science in 2014. He became a Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in 2015. He was elected a fellow of AAAS, ACS, and RSC, respectively in 2016. He was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate) from 2014 to 2022 in nine consecutive years. In 2022, he was awarded a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is a pioneer in “pore engineering”, Texas Pore Engineering Conference (texaspec.net), the design and synthesis of structures with desired individual and collective pore behaviors. His recent research focuses on the discovery of synthetic methods to obtain robust framework materials with unique catalytic activities or desirable properties for clean-energy-related applications such as gas storage, separation, sensing and catalysis. He has published 506 papers (ORCID: 0000-0002-9029-3788) with an h-index of 135 (Google Scholar accessed on Sept. 3, 2023).