Abstract:
The advancement in solving some of the contemporary environmental and technological challenges facing the industry and society hinges on the progress in making new generation of high performance materials with desirable properties and functions. A better understanding of the fundamental structure-property relationships at the molecular level is critical for the rational design and synthesis of such functional materials. This difficult problem has attracted considerable attention in recent years, fueled by the widespread need of efficient materials for applications in such areas as catalysis, sensors, photovoltaic, pharmaceuticals, and membranes, etc.
Transition metal oxide clusters or polyoxometalates are molecular systems with sizes up to several nanometer diameters. They offer versatile building blocks for constructing new materials whose structures can be varied systematically and properties correlated with their constituents and the molecular level. This talk will highlight some of the developments in this exciting area with examples of polyoxometalate based functional materials made in our labs and their intriguing NOx gas sensing and catalytic properties.

Biography: M. Ishaque Khan is Professor of Chemistry at Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago. He is the past Chairman of Chemistry Department and former Associate Dean of the College of Science at Illinois Tech. He has been involved with various professional activities at national and international levels including serving on the Boards of Universities and Professional Journals. Professor Khan received his Ph.D. Degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and did his postdoctoral work at Syracuse University. He has been a German Academic Exchange Fellow at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His research interests include nanoscale science and technology, functional materials for applications in catalysis, sensing, energy storage, and biomedical usage. He has over 90 research publications in peer reviewed professional journals. His research work has been highlighted in Science, Science News, and Chemical and Engineering News, and it has been incorporated in premier chemistry textbooks. He has delivered over 100 Plenary-, Keynote-, Invited-, and Commencement talks around the World, and organized over a dozen international/national conferences/symposia and workshops.