The global transition to clean energy requires new ways of storing sunlight in the form of chemical fuels and useful chemicals. Today, most industrial chemical processes still rely on fossil fuels, high temperatures, or expensive metals. One promising alternative is photocatalysis – using light to drive chemical reactions – but most current systems work only in organic solvents, contain rare metals, or cannot store energy efficiently. As a result, there is a need for new approaches that can operate in water, use abundant materials, and perform complex chemical transformations using only light.
This project addresses these challenges by developing organic molecules and soft materials that can capture sunlight, store its energy, and use it to perform useful chemistry. The central idea is that molecules can behave very differently when they come together and organise into larger structures, known as supramolecular assemblies. By carefully designing the building blocks and controlling how they assemble, we aim to create materials that respond to light in new and useful ways: for example, by generating clean fuels such as hydrogen, converting simple chemicals into more valuable ones, or storing energy for use in the dark.
The project focuses on three main objectives. First, we design and study new light-absorbing organic molecules that can work effectively in water. Second, we explore how these molecules organise into larger structures and how this organisation changes their ability to capture and use light energy. Third, we develop functional catalytic systems, including soft and dynamic materials, that can perform demanding reactions such as the conversion of acetylene into ethylene – an important process for producing plastics – or the transformation of biomass-derived glycerol into valuable products.
By combining molecular design, supramolecular chemistry, and green photocatalysis, the project aims to demonstrate fundamentally new ways to control chemical reactivity using light. The expected impact is twofold: advancing our scientific understanding of how organised molecular systems work, and laying the foundation for future technologies that use sunlight to produce chemicals more sustainably, with minimal waste and no reliance on scarce resources.
