Gustav

@Triller I’d link it but I don’t want to dox myself too hard…long story short, I make catalysts—probably a bigger deal than most people realize because just about anything that’s made with a chemical process involves a catalyst somewhere. 
 

Catalysts can be any sort of chemical themselves, but I work mostly with solid catalysts in liquid solutions. That’s really cool if it works well because instead of doing something like distillation (energy and money) to separate a liquid catalyst, you can just filter out the solids (and ideally also reuse them!) when you’re done with what you need to do. But solid materials require lots of work to design because lots of little factors can throw off how they function that just aren’t issues for liquids. 
 

What I do specifically isn’t as broad or exciting as the big idea itself, but it’s all part of the field of biomass upgrading—basically taking old plant material and turning it into things that would usually be derived from oil. For example, we can take sugars from any plant and turn them into biodegradable plastics or fuels that actually work great; it just isn’t generally what you see out there now because we haven’t developed a way to get there as efficiently as with oil yet. So in my paper, I take a catalyst that was previously developed by my group for an important biomass-related reaction and just change a few things about it that make it work better. It’s still FAR from perfect and really just minor progress, but it’s the first time I’ve put anything out yet and I’m proud of it. 

That's amazing!! Congratulations!! 

Yay for our favorite IA VHLM Commissioner!!!! Really man that's mad cool.