CU Boulder scientist wins Brown Investigator Award

University of Colorado Boulder scientist Gordana Dukovic has been named a 2024 Brown Investigator Award winner, a recognition that will support her research to develop new insights into solar chemistry.

Dukovic, a professor of chemistry and fellow in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, is one of eight award recipients from universities across the United States who conduct basic research in chemistry or physics. Each winner will receive up to $2 million distributed over five years.

The Brown Investigator Award is given by the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech, which was founded "to support bold investigations with the potential for transformational discoveries that will ultimately benefit humanity,” according to founder Ross M. Brown. It supports mid-career physics and chemistry researchers in the United States who are pursuing new directions of inquiry.

Gordana Dukovic, a CU Boulder professor of chemistry, was named one of eight 2024 Brown Investigator Award winners Wednesday.

For Dukovic, that will mean broadening the work that she and the members of her interdisciplinary research group pursue in the field of nanoscience for solar energy harvesting.

“In this work, we often couple nanomaterials with biological catalysts, which are called enzymes,” Dukovic explains. “Nanomaterials can absorb sunlight and then give electrons generated by sunlight to the enzymes, which then do enzyme-catalyzed transformations that make new molecules.

“What we’re finding in our work is that the outcomes of these solar processes are very sensitive to the details of how the nanomaterials interact with enzymes, which are difficult to determine. We know that there are elements of chemical structure that are going to be extremely important for the function of these materials we’re making, but they’re very difficult to see. This award will allow us to adapt and use the tools of electron microscopy in new ways to transform our understanding of the structure of the materials we work with.”

‘This hasn’t been done before’

Because the Brown Investigator Award supports basic science, Dukovic emphasizes that her new area of research isn’t focused on making an existing device more efficient, but on learning how to control the outcomes of light-driven reactions.

“When we try to use sunlight to make new molecules, like fuels or other useful chemicals, there are a lot of other places where the solar energy can go, (including) unproductive pathways where it can go,” she says. “So, we want to understand what controls whether a pathway is going to productive or unproductive and how to enhance the productive pathways.”

Dukovic and her colleagues will explore the role of the structure of the materials that they’re making in determining these photochemical pathways and how they then we can make materials that have efficient photochemical pathways. Ultimately, she says, this may lead to new solar technologies.

“A lot of the chemical products that we use today, such as fuels or fertilizers or other common chemicals, they’re made in really energy-intensive, polluting ways,” Dukovic says. “We want to find ways to use sunlight to make the chemicals that our society uses more sustainable.”

In her lab, Dukovic and her colleagues make semiconductor nanocrystals, which are tiny, light-emitting particles like quantum dots. They then study what happens after these materials absorb sunlight. Sometimes they couple nanocrystals with catalysts like enzymes or other molecules and then study the movement of electrons through the resulting chemical transformations.

Dukovic’s research relies on electron microscopy, but with a unique approach that combines two main types of it: cryo-electron, which is good for studying biomaterials like cells and proteins, and materials electron microscopy “looking at what each technique can learn from the other field,” Dukovic explains. “How can we use these tools together to learn what we need to learn about the structure of materials?

“We’re using tools from the field that have not been used in this way before, so it’s more high-risk, and the (Brown Investigator Award) gives us more time and resources to figure it out, because this hasn’t been done before.”