Honors and Awards

• Howard B. Wentz, Jr. SEAS Junior Faculty Award, 2021
• Princeton Engineering Commendation for Outstanding Teaching, 2021
• Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York Chair, 2021-
• AIChE Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Board of Director, 2020-
• Climate and Energy Grand Challenge Award, High Meadows Environmental Institute, 2020
• NAE Frontiers of Engineering Symposium Invitee, 2019
• UC Berkeley Heinz Heinemann Award for Graduate Research in Catalysis, 2015
• National Science Foundation’s Graduate Student Research Fellow, 2011
• North American Catalysis Society Robert J. Kokes Award, 2011

Affiliations

• Associated Faculty, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
• Associated Faculty, Department of Chemistry
• Associated Faculty, Princeton Materials Institute

Research Interests

Many industrial practices that use catalysts to produce chemicals, fuels, polymers, and pharmaceuticals have strong environmental impacts. The mission of our lab is to make advances in catalysis science and active site engineering to solve both fundamental and applied chemical engineering challenges to sustainably meet our growing energy and product demands. The Sarazen research group combines kinetic, synthetic, and theoretical techniques to elucidate reaction mechanisms of heterogeneous catalysts at the molecular level for atom- and energy-efficient conversions from conventional (petroleum), emerging (shale gas) and renewable (biomass- or electrocatalytically-derived) feedstocks to fuels and chemicals.

We primarily focus on one class of heterogeneous catalysts: porous crystalline materials such as zeolites, metal-organic frameworks, and porous organic polymers, which offer a large and diverse pool of catalysts and catalyst supports. Elucidating how important catalytic properties affect reactivity and selectivity, and controlling these properties via advanced synthesis strategies, are vital for the optimization and potential industrial application of heterogeneous catalysts. Precise synthesis of zeolites functionalized with various active sites or altered pore structures and metal-organic frameworks with flexible node and linker properties will allow interpretable kinetic measurements, which will be combined with density functional theory calculations, to develop a molecular understanding of how reaction networks proceed.