Ezra Clark, the Thomas K. Hepler Early Career Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering. Credit: Caleb Craig/Penn State.
Q&A: Can chemical manufacturing become more sustainable?
Chemical engineering faculty member selected for Beckman Young Investigator Program
July 1, 2025
By Mariah Lucas
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — New research into unconventional chemical reactors could lead to more sustainable manufacturing processes for everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals, according to Ezra Clark, the Thomas K. Hepler Early Career Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering. Clark was selected to receive $600,000 over four years as a Beckman Young Investigator, funded by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. The program provides research support to promising faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences, according to the foundation, to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open new avenues of scientific research. Clark is one of 10 investigators selected from a pool of about 300 applicants.
Clark joined Penn State in 2022 as an assistant professor after serving as a postdoctoral scholar at the Technical University of Denmark for three years. He received a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2018 and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Louisville in 2012. Clark’s lab, the Ezra L. Clark Research Group, focuses on designing sustainable energy solutions using electrocatalysts, which are materials that enable conversion between chemical and electrical forms of energy. Clark’s group also works to identify the mechanisms of the related reactions and to leverage this information to develop electrocatalysts and electrocatalytic reactors.
In this Q&A, Clark discussed his goals for the project.
Q: What are your goals for this project?
Clark: My primary goal for the project, “Enhancing the Activity of Selective Semi-Hydrogenation and Partial Oxidation Catalysts Using Thermo-Electrocatalytic Synergy,” is to explore unconventional ways of performing selective partial hydrogenation and oxidation reactions. These reactions are used to add hydrogen or oxygen atoms to specific portions of a molecule while leaving other portions of the molecule untouched. This capability is critical to the production of everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals. Improving the efficiency of these broadly implemented reactions would significantly reduce the environmental impact of the chemical industry while improving process economics.
Our primary goal is to demonstrate that the activity and selectivity of these reactions can be significantly improved by synergistically linking thermal catalysts using electrochemical pumping. The thermal catalysts used in conversional processes either produce very little of the desired product or a lot of undesired products, neither of which is acceptable. Like using a conventional pump to transport water to an arid region for vacationers to enjoy, our idea is to overcome this limitation by synergistically linking thermal catalysts that are good at the activity- and selectivity-determining portions of the reaction using electrochemical pumping, which enables the surface species on one catalyst to be pumped onto the surface of another catalyst using electrical current.
Q: How will students, including your graduate assistants and undergraduates, contribute to this project?
Clark: Students will play a central role in this project. They will design and perform experiments, analyze the resulting data and work with me to interpret the results and plan the next steps. These students will gain both fundamental knowledge into chemical kinetics, which describes the rate and selectivity of chemical reactions in an ideal setting, as well as gain applied expertise in the design and operation of chemical reactors.
Q: What are the practical applications of this project? Could this research help create greener or more efficient chemical processes in the future?
Clark: The project could result in new and unconventional commodity and fine chemical synthesis strategies that are more efficient and less environmentally damaging than those that are currently in practice. Two reactions we are targeting are acetylene semi-hydrogenation to ethylene and ethylene partial oxidation to ethylene oxide. The former is important for removing trace acetylene, which negatively impacts the chemical processes used to convert ethylene into polyethylene, the world’s most abundantly produced plastic. The latter is used to produce a versatile chemical precursor that plays a central role in the chemical industry. However, the approach we will be investigating is compatible with many different reactions and could thus be broadly applied within the chemical industry.
Creating more sustainable and more efficient chemical processes was the primary motivation behind the project, and this nicely into the broader theme of my research group, which aims to develop more sustainable and environmentally benign chemical manufacturing technologies. However, the technology is currently in its infancy and a lot of work will have to be done before either its economic viability or environmental impact can be accurately assessed. We expect to make a significant leap in this direction during the project.
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