Brian Rosen
Talk: Discovering the right transition metal carbide alloy for electrocatalysis
Catalysts used in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are often supported by carbon, which is susceptible to corrosion at operating potentials. Transition metal carbides (TMCs) are a class of material that could be used as catalyst supports to replace carbon as they are electrically conductive and can be resistant to such corrosion. TMCs which show promising activity for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), however, have been shown to suffer from oxidation, whereas corrosion-resistant carbides tend to have significantly lower ORR activities. Here we show with computational and experimental evidence that alloying between different types of carbides can be an effective technique to meet both the activity and durability needs of fuel cells, and more broadly, electrochemical devices. We investigate the effect on both 3D and 2D transition metal carbides based on titanium and molybdenum while substituting oxyphilic atoms such as tantalum, hafnium, and niobium. Given the exceedingly large number of possible materials, computational techniques are used to guide experimental synthesis in order to narrow the field of potentially successful materials.
BIO:
Brian Rosen is the Vice Dean for International Affairs in the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University, where he is also a full professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the head of the Energy Materials Laboratory. The laboratory specializes in the design of novel ceramic catalysts for fuel cells (PEMFC, AFC, H2/NH3-SOFC), and synthetic fuel production (H2, NH3, syngas) via thermochemical and electrochemical routes. The Rosen lab investigates ways to modulate catalyst activity by tuning the metal-ceramic interface via multi-scale defect engineering, strain engineering, solid-state phase separations, and electronic structure modulation. Rosen was named a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Fellow in 2010. His work was the basis for a U.S.-based startup company, Dioxide Materials, which develops industrial CO2 electrolyzers. He was a co-founder for the Israeli startup FontoPower, acquired by SolarEdge in 2023, which developed SOFC-Battery hybrid systems. Rosen recently co-founded PyroH2, a natural gas pyrolysis company based on his multiphase catalyst design. Rosen received the Young Innovator Award in Nanocatalysis Research from Springer in 2021, the Climate Solutions Breakthrough Research Prize in 2023, and was elected as a Senior Member to the U.S. National Academy of Inventors in 2025.