Lu Cun earned his PhD in Physical Chemistry at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. The topic of his PhD thesis was to explore supported gold catalysts for oxidation reactions. Then he worked as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral Fellow at Ulm University in Germany, where he investigated the reaction mechanisms of CO oxidation as well as the water-gas-shift reaction on gold catalysts using Temporal Analysis of Products (TAP) reactor.

Currently, his research in the Friend group is centered around the catalytic behavior of nanoporous gold materials in vapor-phase selective oxidation reactions under ambient conditions. Gold-mediated oxidative coupling reactions have been extensively studied on gold single crystals under ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) conditions. Whether the mechanistic understanding derived from UHV studies can be applied to predict and to guide the reactions under ambient pressure conditions, however, requires further inspections. To this end, kinetic studies of oxidative coupling of alcohols are conducted in both fixed-bed flow reactor and TAP reactor.

This project aims to understand the reaction mechanisms as well as the structural requirements for selectivity control in vapor-phase selective oxidation reactions catalyzed by gold-based alloys so as to guide the rational design of highly efficient catalysts. We conduct both steady and short pulse transient experiments in a temporal analysis of products (TAP) reactor in order to extract kinetic information regarding the key steps, i.e., the activation of molecular oxygen, in the selective oxidation of alcohols over nanoporous (Ag)Au catalyst and the role of adsorbed oxygen species in selectivity tuning.