NEWS

Jay Agarwal

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2014

Jay Agarwal, a recent doctoral graduate in chemistry, is an extraodinary researcher. At UGA, he published 10 peer-reviewed articles in top scientific journals in his field, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chemie. Moreover, he earned his doctoral degree in two years and nine months, approximately three years sooner than the average student. Much of his research focuses on converting the carbon dioxide released as a byproduct of large-scale combustion into useful products. Specifically, Agarwal creates catalysts to mediate this conversion — his first papers describe mechanisms of well-known rhenium-based catalysts, while later papers detail the synthesis and characterization of new, inexpensive manganese-centered catalysts. This and other projects are producing the requisite innovation for realizing clean combustion.