Subject Award · Physical Sciences & Engineering · 2026
The ten finalist universities are the ten highest-ranked on the Chemical Engineering collaboration index, listed here alphabetically until the full index publishes on 15 September. Each finalist is represented by an academic whose recent work exemplifies why: a real project, drawn from the open scholarly record, cited so you can check it.
The finalists
Turning nitrate into ammonia electrochemically demands catalysts with the right metal-nitrogen chemistry. By doping an anti-perovskite cobalt nitride with copper, the team strengthened the cobalt-nitrogen bond and shifted the metal's electronic structure, promoting the key hydrogenation steps and delivering improved performance, insights confirmed through advanced spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations.
Balancing the global nitrogen cycle means finding better ways to convert nitrate back into ammonia, particularly in neutral solutions where performance has lagged. Using a one-pot synthesis, the team produced ultrathin nanosheet-assembled ruthenium and iron nanoflowers with low-coordinated ruthenium sites, reaching 92.9 per cent faradaic efficiency for ammonia, with experiment and theory pointing to an increased d-band centre.
Energy Applications of Ionic Liquids: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Ionic liquids, salts made entirely of ions with fascinating and tunable properties, are finding uses across the energy landscape, from battery electrolytes and heat transfer fluids to carbon dioxide capture, biofuel extraction and high-energy propellants. The work provides an extensive overview of these applications, sets out the fundamentals, and weighs the current challenges and emerging opportunities in each area.
Highly Efficient and Stable Methane Dry Reforming Enabled by a Single-Site Cationic Ni Catalyst
Nickel catalysts for the dry reforming of methane are usually assumed to work in their metallic form, and this study challenges that assumption. Using a ligand-protected synthesis to lock nickel into the framework of an MFI zeolite, the team show the nickel stays cationic during reaction at 600 degrees Celsius, giving higher activity and markedly better stability than supported metallic particles.
Spin-related Cu-Co pair to increase electrochemical ammonia generation on high-entropy oxides
Turning nitrate pollution in water into useful ammonia depends on the fine detail of the catalyst surface. Working with a high-entropy oxide containing magnesium, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc, the team show that the spin state of cobalt governs the copper and cobalt synergy: high spin cobalt assists ammonia generation, while low spin cobalt weakens the effect.
Propane dehydrogenation: catalyst development, new chemistry, and emerging technologies
Propylene underpins products from polypropylene to acrylonitrile, and making it directly from propane has become an industrial route of growing interest. This review covers recent advances in propane dehydrogenation, including catalyst development, the active sites and reaction pathways over metals and metal oxides, and the deactivation mechanisms that limit how long a catalyst lasts.
Most work on making ammonia electrochemically from nitrate targets the dilute levels found in wastewater, leaving the concentrated nitrate in nuclear and fertiliser wastes unexplored. Here a ruthenium and copper oxide cocatalyst system runs at 10 amps in one molar nitrate in a flow electrolyser with full faradaic efficiency towards ammonia, with the mechanism probed by deuterium labelling and operando infrared spectroscopy.
Near ambient N2 fixation on solid electrodes versus enzymes and homogeneous catalysts
Three very different systems can fix nitrogen near ambient conditions: solid electrodes, enzymes and homogeneous catalysts. The work sets them side by side, comparing electrochemical nitrogen fixation with the biological and molecular chemistry that already performs the same transformation, a comparison that clarifies what each approach actually contributes.
Advances in ammonia electrosynthesis from ambient nitrate/nitrite reduction
Ambient electrosynthesis offers a different route to ammonia, and this review gathers recent advances in producing it by reducing nitrate and nitrite. Rather than reporting a single experiment, the work maps where progress has been made across the field and what the emerging approaches to this conversion have in common.
Electrocatalytic Reduction of Nitrate to Ammonia on Low-Cost Ultrathin CoOx Nanosheets
Ammonia is normally made under harsh conditions, which makes an electrochemical route from nitrate at ambient conditions appealing. This study designs low-cost ultrathin cobalt oxide nanosheets rich in surface oxygen, reporting a high ammonia yield with faradaic efficiency above 90 per cent, and calculations indicating that surface oxygen suppresses the competing hydrogen evolution reaction.
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Pulsed electroreduction of low-concentration nitrate to ammonia
Propane dehydrogenation: catalyst development, new chemistry, and emerging technologies
Self-assembled iron-containing mordenite monolith for carbon dioxide sieving
Advances in ammonia electrosynthesis from ambient nitrate/nitrite reduction
Sulfur vacancy-rich MoS2 as a catalyst for the hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol
A critical review on the use of potentiometric based biosensors for biomarkers detection
Sulfur vacancy-rich MoS2 as a catalyst for the hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol
Propane dehydrogenation: catalyst development, new chemistry, and emerging technologies
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