The Kharkiv Chemical Seminar, initiated by the Institute of Chemistry of Functional Materials of the NTK "Institute of Monocrystals" of the NAS of Ukraine, invites all interested parties to engage in communication and scientific discussions at the upcoming lecture, which will take place on April 9, 2026 at 16:00 (Kyiv time). The event will be held online on the Zoom platform.
Lecturer: Professor Mircea Dincă (Prof. Mircea Dincă) – Alexander Stewart Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University (USA), one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the country, part of the Ivy League. He earned his education at Princeton University (Bachelor's degree in Chemistry), completed graduate studies in inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and then conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Mircea Dincă’s scientific interests focus on the synthesis of new multifunctional materials, particularly for applications in electrical and electronic devices, heterogeneous catalysis, as well as technologies related to clean and renewable energy sources.
Lecture topic: "From electrically conductive MOFs to sustainable batteries."
The emergence of electrically conductive metal-organic frameworks (c-MOFs) has been one of the most unexpected achievements in this field over the past few years. Indeed, how can charges be transported through a material that mostly consists of "empty" space? In this regard, MOFs formed by layers of organic ligands connected typically by flat square metal ions have demonstrated particularly high electrical conductivity. However, the exact mechanism of charge transport remains a subject of debate, and various experimental and computational studies describe these materials as metals, semiconductors, or semimetals. The lecture will describe the latest research from Prof. Mircea Dincă’s group aimed at understanding the internal properties of 2D c-MOFs, especially in the context of electrical conductivity studies of single crystals, and will consider, in particular, the unexpectedly large impact of interplanar transport. It will be discussed how these fundamental studies directly led to the discovery of a safe organic cathode material that is competitive compared to existing oxides in lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries.
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