Global climate change from rising atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide is one of the greatest threats facing humankind. The current leading technology for carbon capture from emission streams and air, amine-based scrubbers, show high selectivities for carbon capture but are plagued by unavoidable limitations such as poor thermal and oxidative stability. Herein, we will discuss our lab’s efforts to develop next-generation alternatives to amine-based scrubbers. First, we will discuss efforts to install reactive hydroxide groups into porous solid supports; these sites react reversibly with carbon dioxide via bicarbonate formation. We will extend these findings to carbon capture using other types of oxygen-based nucleophiles, which display significantly improved oxidative stability compared to amines. Last, we will discuss our efforts to move beyond traditional temperature/pressure swings and use light as a cheap stimulus for driving both carbon dioxide capture and release.

Phill was born a stone’s throw from Ithaca in Towanda, PA and grew up near Rochester, NY. Phill attended Hamilton College near Utica, NY, where his love of synthetic organic chemistry was born while working on radical cyclizations with Prof. Ian Rosenstein. Phill graduated from Hamilton College in 2010 with B.A.s in Chemistry and Mathematics, and went on to pursue his Ph.D. in Chemistry with Prof. Stephen Buchwald at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the Buchwald group, Phill carried out extensive mechanistic studies of the Pd-catalyzed fluorination of aryl (pseudo)halides, a reaction of importance due to the prevalence of aryl fluorides in pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. Phill also developed the nearly instantaneous 11C-cyanation of aryl halides for the synthesis of PET radiotracers. Phill joined the group of Prof. Jeffrey Long at the University of California, Berkeley upon graduating from MIT in 2015. As a post-doctoral Fellow in the Long group, Phill designed amine-functionalized metal–organic frameworks for the removal of CO2 from the flue gas emissions of power plants. In 2018, Phill joined the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, where his research is focused broadly at the intersection of organic, inorganic, and materials chemistry. Phill is a member of the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) and the Cornell Energy Systems Institute (CESI), a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow, and a field member in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Phill’s independent awards and honors include: Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2023), NSF CAREER Award (2021), Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Award for Excellence in Advising (2021), Scialog Fellowship (2020), Department of Energy Early Career Award (2020), and NIH Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award (2020).