Our colleague Carmen Martínez-Alonso, member of the Bio/Chemo/Mechanics of Materials group, has obtained a Fulbright predoctoral scholarship to spend six months at the Center for Interface Science and Catalysis (SUNCAT), SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University.

She will work under the supervision of Dr. Abild-Pedersen (co-director of SUNCAT) and Dr. Kirsten Winther on the development of machine learning algorithms to predict the effect of elastic strains on the catalytic properties of intermetallic compounds. The algorithms will be trained with the data generated by Carmen during her Doctoral work at our Institute. They will be used to explore the catalytic activity for the hydrogen evolution reaction and the oxygen reduction reactions (critical processes for hydrogen generation by water splitting and energy production from hydrogen, respectively) of a large number of intermetallic compounds.

SUNCAT is one of the leading research centres globally in the exploration of high-throughput techniques to discover new catalysts. It hosts catalysis-hub.org, the largest repository of adsorption energies to predict the catalytic activity of materials.