Bryan graduated from Caltech with a PhD in chemistry. He received his BS and MS in chemistry at Yale University. At Caltech, he developed innovative techniques to gain insights into water oxidation mechanisms on heterogeneous catalysts. Specifically, he appied operando spectroscopies to identify transient, highly active mixed-metal species during turnover on novel nanocatalysts synthesized by pulsed-laser ablation in liquids. The obtained mechanistic details enable the development of new, earth-abundant, more efficient, and robust materials for electrocatalytic water splitting for sustainable conversion of solar energy into storable fuels.
Bryan was awarded the Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis Prize in Environmentally Benign Renewable Energy Sources for his work on the development and characterization of a nickel-iron layered double hydroxide water oxidation catalyst with the goal of developing a solar-driven device for the synthesis of fuels, with hydrogen production as a target. He was also awarded a 2017 Herbert Newby McCoy Award for outstanding chemistry graduate students for his thesis research, "Fuels and Materials from Sunlight and Water".
In 2018, Bryan was awarded the ACS 2019 Nobel Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry for his doctoral thesis.
Bryan is currently an assistant professor of Chemistry at Northwestern.
RSI Research: Mechanistic Understanding of [NiFe]-LDH-Mediated Water Oxidation Catalysis by Novel In-situ Spectroscopies
