Jeffrey Greeley received a Ph.D. in 2004 from the Department of Chemical Engineering at UW-Madison under the supervision of Manos Mavrikakis. He performed postdoctoral research with Jens Nørskov at the Technical University of Denmark from 2004-2006, after which he moved to the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory as an Assistant Scientist. He was promoted to the rank of Scientist in 2011, and in January of 2013, he joined the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University as an Associate Professor with tenure. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2018 and received the Charles Davidson Professorship in Chemical Engineering in 2021.
Professor Greeley’s research is broadly focused on enhancing society’s ability to meet critical energy and environmental grand challenges by understanding, predicting, and controlling the interactions of molecules with solid surfaces. He addresses these needs with a combination of detailed focus on surface thermodynamics and distillation of the essence of kinetics from microkinetic analysis and mechanistic reduction. Key features of his work include choice of research problems whose solutions impact the frontiers of the field, development of new or significantly expanded atomic-level theory that matches the demands of the problem at hand, use of computational screening and other concepts to dramatically increase the scope of the solutions and identify targeted new materials, and close interaction with experimentalists in both materials development and analysis of detailed reaction kinetics.