Sloan Scholar Isabel Albelo: using sunlight to create fuel

 

UC San Diego materials science PhD student Isabel Albelo has her sights set on a lofty goal: generating carbon-neutral fuels through a reaction powered by the sun. It might sound like science fiction, but this field of photocatalysis is real and booming, as society works to find solutions to climate change. 

“It’s kind of the ideal as far as renewable energy goes,” Albelo said of this type of artificial photocatalysis. “When people think of renewable energy, they think of solar cells. The technical limit on that being efficiency in our power grid; electrical energy can be more difficult to transport and requires upgrades in battery technology. Whereas with artificial photosynthesis, you’re forming either liquid or gas fuels, which are things we have pipelines for, we know how to combust, that we can use in current industrial processes. It’s basically making the things we’re already using but in a carbon neutral way. So it's really exciting.”

Albelo is a PhD student in nanoengineering Professor David Fenning’s Solar Energy Innovation Lab. She’s also a Sloan Scholar, and received a four-year fellowship worth $40,000, meant to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists of outstanding promise. Her interest in this research is personal. 

“It’s become obvious that the climate crisis is the challenge of this generation and every one that comes after,” she said. “I grew up in a very active, outdoorsy family, and those are things I want to be able to do and want others to be able to do for the rest of their lives. So from that perspective, I think it’s really easy to find a driving force to do this work.”

Though she began her PhD during the COVID-19 pandemic, Albelo has still been able to start her research, thanks to UC San Diego’s Return to Learn protocols allowing in-lab research at reduced capacities. Her current project is a collaboration with UT Austin, optimizing the performance of photoactive nanoparticles to reduce carbon dioxide.  She uses a solar simulator-- a small laser-- to pass a liquid full of carbon dioxide through the laser, and get different chemicals and fuels out . 

“The CO2 reduction reaction is a bit of a black box as far as the mechanism,” Albelo said. “You put in CO2 and can get methane, carbon monoxide, formate… it’s kind of a mixed bag of different things. So that’s one of the challenges that I’m working on is being able to force your reaction to produce one thing, and produce it efficiently.”

For Albelo, the Sloan Scholar program has been more than just a scholarship—it’s provided a sense of community during a time when that was harder to come by due to social distancing and pandemic precautions. 

“When I first moved here, as far as interpersonal interactions, I had my roommate, two friends I already knew, and then the Sloan Scholars welcome program. Getting to interact with other first year incoming PhD students that way was really awesome. It’s a really exciting and uplifting program to be involved with as far as their work for representation, which is hugely important.”