Aojie Li, a third year graduate student in the Lehigh research group of Professor Srinivas Rangarajan, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, won 2nd place in the student poster competition at the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Annual Meeting (Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division) held in Orlando, FL.

His poster was entitled "A DFT-based microkinetic modeling study to elucidate the role of direct hydrogen transfer in transfer hydrogenation on transition metal catalysts". Li presented his computational research on mechanistic understanding of catalytic transfer hydrogenation, a catalytic technology that can enable sustainable and decarbonized hydrogenation of biomass to value-added chemicals. This research is supported by an NSF CAREER grant received by Professor Rangarajan in 2021.