January 2026 Meeting

Please join us for our January meeting where Dr. Caroline Lee will present her work titled, Modulating Electrode Selectivity for Small Molecule Conversion via Substrate Availability.

The meeting will take place Thursday, January 29 at 7:00 PM in the Koch Center for Engineering and Science Building, room 101, on the University of Evansville campus. A link to the campus map is provided below.

Prior to the meeting, please join us for dinner at 5:00 PM at Turoni’s Forget-Me-Not on North Weinbach Avenue. If you plan to attend the dinner, please RSVP by Tuesday, January 27 to Phillip Voegel at phillip.voegel@kwc.edu

Abstract of Dr. Lee’s talk: The search for active, stable, and durable materials for electrochemical energy technologies requires increasing levels of precision to establish true structure-function relationships and guide materials design from atomic and molecular scale. This increases the level of control required over the experimental system for proper materials evaluation. When working at high voltages required by processes such as the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and H₂ evolution reaction (HER), contamination from the counter electrode can lead to misleading results. Here we will discuss an “old school” technique, utilizing a Pt counter electrode that uses the hydrogen reduction reaction to maintain a controlled potential environment. We have designed and constructed a counter electrode that capitalizes on this reaction. This work provides a guide to the implementation of Pt|H₂ counter electrodes to improve the precision of electrochemical experiments in search of highly active, selective, and durable materials for energy technologies.

University of Evansville Campus Map

Announcement pdf