Dr Kai Sellschopp

Associate Investigator

Towards Zero Carbon - Catalytic Architectures

Address:
Chemical & Process Engineering
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch 8140
New Zealand

• Kai.Sellschopp@canterbury.ac.nz

Biography

Kai Sellschopp is a Computational Materials Scientist with an interdisciplinary background, holding degrees in both materials engineering and physics from the TU Dresden (Germany). His PhD at the Hamburg University of Technology focused on modelling interactions between small organic molecules and transition metal oxide surfaces. Following his interest in machine learning, he also spent four months at the EPFL in Lausanne as a visiting scholar. As a Postdoctoral Walter-Benjamin Fellow at the Institute of Hydrogen Technology at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, Kai studied metal hydrides for hydrogen storage applications using atomic-scale modelling methods. He recently got appointed as a Lecturer of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Canterbury, where he now builds a group for the Computational Design of Sustainable Chemical Processes.

Research interests

Kai's research centres around materials for a sustainable future. Following this interest, he engages in research on different classes of materials: metal hydrides for hydrogen storage, interfaces between oxides and small organic molecules for CO2 reduction, magnetocaloric materials for harvesting waste heat, and metallic electrodes for water splitting. To gain a better understanding of the relevant processes in these applications, Kai employs multi-scale materials modelling techniques with a focus on ab initio calculations. As this can be computationally demanding, he also applies state-of-the-art machine-learning tools to build surrogate models that can speed up simulations. Since isolated calculations without experimental validation can only provide limited insights, he establishes feedback loops with researchers working on experimental materials characterisation as much as possible.