Professor Rodney Smith is the proud recipient of the 2024 Strem Chemicals Award for Pure or Applied Inorganic Chemistry. This award is presented annually to a scientist who has made outstanding contributions to inorganic chemistry in Canada.
As an Associate Professor in Chemistry, Smith’s research seeks to support the expansion of sustainable fuels by developing experimental strategies and analytical tools that assist in establishing catalyst design principles. The primary strategy is to acquire diverse data that enables multivariate correlational analysis, also known as structure-property or structure-function analysis.
He implements a unique strategy in the field of sustainable fuels, focusing on developing synthetic protocols to systematically introduce small structural defects or distortions rather than significant compositional changes. This approach has guided his team in identifying defects and distortions in solid state materials that are unresolvable through traditional methods.
Smith’s team has demonstrated that correlational analysis on such families of defective catalysts can reveal previously undiagnosed structural distortions and defects. These correlations also provide insights into the functional role of specific defects on the overall electrochemical behaviour of a system. His published work moves beyond the widely communicated view that defects either activate or deactivate catalysts, instead providing compelling evidence that the mixture of electronic and geometric effects that arise from any specific defect can be used to reveal their impact on catalytic mechanisms.
Smith is honoured to be selected as a winner and looks forward to giving a symposium award lecture at the Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition (CSC 2024) this June.
I am very grateful for my team and my colleagues who have made this award possible. I look forward to the conference in June and continuing my journey in understanding how defects in solid state materials alter the chemical reactivity of catalysts.