dr. G (Guanna) Li

I received my  Ph.D. degrees from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), supported by the Programme for Strategic Scientific Alliances between China and the Netherlands. My first PhD project was Raman Optical Activity (ROA) of chiral molecules. However, amazed by catalysis during my exchange study at TU/e, I decided to pursue another PhD in heterogeneous catalysis and computational modeling and successfully defended my PhD thesis at TU/e, under the supervision of Prof. Rutger van Santen and Prof. Can Li.

Afterward, I continued as a postdoc in the Inorganic Materials & Catalysis (IMC) group at TU/e, where I worked on the reaction mechanism of catalytic conversions of biomass and methane to valuable chemicals. In 2016, I was awarded the VENI Talent Programme grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and moved to Delft University of Technology to pursue my independent research in multiscale and operando modeling. The reactions I investigated included direct methane oxidation to methanol and CO2 hydrogenation to methanol.  

Since February 2020, I have been working in the Biobased Chemistry and Technology (BCT) groups of Wageningen University as an assistant professor. My research team focuses on catalyst design and reaction mechanism study on the surface and at the interface of heterogeneous catalysis. Using state-of-the-art and advanced quantum mechanical methodologies of DFT, ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD), enhanced sampling of metadynamics (AIMtD) and machine learning (ML) models, my team aims to get molecular-level insights into the dynamic evolution of the catalyst induced by the reaction atmosphere and the complex reaction networks. Our target is to build up the on-the-fly structure-activity relationships of dynamic catalysis and, therefore, to establish rational catalyst design principles.