Oana Luca is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (BS ’08) and Yale University (MS ’10, PhD ’13) where she worked with Professor Robert H. Crabtree. At Yale she worked with a team from General Electron to develop hybrid fuel cell flow batteries for virtual storage of hydrogen within organic molecules. Her postgraduate work in inorganic and physical organic chemistry at Caltech in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis and the Scripps Research Institute addressed applications of electrochemical methods for the synthesis and interconversion of chemical species in organic reactions. This work has direct applications to battery, fuel cell and solar device designs as well as electrosynthetic methods for functionalization of organic compounds. Her scientific interests span a wide range of research fields from the engineering of devices for energy production and storage, to molecular orbital interactions in surface science, to electrochemical applications in organic synthesis, polymer recycling and in operando assessments of product distributions. The current research focus of her team at University of Colorado is the electrochemical activation, capture and valorization of unreactive molecules such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen or macromolecules in waste polymers through the use of protons and electrons as energy currency.
