Wesley Bernskoetter
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Thank goodness for hydrocarbons.
This multipurpose blend of carbon and hydrogen atoms produces much of the world’s energy, yielding essential products such as gasoline, home heating oil and plastics. Trouble is, burning hydrocarbons to derive fuels and goods produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a primary villain in the global warming drama.
Scientists like Wesley Bernskoetter are trying to figure out how to keep the benefits of hydrocarbons without the climate change costs. One idea that Bernskoetter, an incoming assistant professor in chemistry, wants to pursue is to produce hydrocarbon-based products synthetically, using a renewable carbon source. To pull that off, he explains, you need a really good catalyst.
That’s where the field of organometallics comes in. Bernskoetter seeks to create metal-based molecules that can act as catalysts to optimize chemical reactions for transforming energy sources into forms that we can use.
He calls it “undoing nature,” by creating “commodity chemicals” from sources that have little commercial value.
One energy source Bernskoetter is studying as an input is carbon dioxide. However, CO2, he explained, is stable, meaning you need a lot of energy to break its molecular bonds. “You need a powerful metal catalyst to rip it apart,” Bernskoetter said.
In the meantime, Bernskoetter knows we’ll need crude oil as an energy source for the near future at least. So, his research also looks at how organometallics may be created, and used, to burn crude oil more efficiently. Specifically, he’s examining the utility of the metals molybdenum (a silvery metal often used in high-strength steel alloys) and tungsten.
“We want to find a better way to do that than what we’re doing now,” he said.
Bernskoetter comes to Brown by way of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he was a postdoctoral research associate. The 29-year-old grew up near Jefferson City, Missouri and earned his PhD in chemistry at Cornell University in 2006. He and his wife of seven years, Stephanie, have a daughter, Alana.
He chose Brown in part because the university is aggressively pursuing research in energy and alternative energy solutions.
Brown has a “good core of young faculty that I thought I would fit in well with and who have similar research perspectives,” he said