DR. SAMEH ELSAIDI
Assistant Professor of Materials Chemistry at Illinois Institute of Technology
"I can hardly doubt that when we have some control of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get an enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can have, and of different things that we can do."
Richard P. Feynman, December 29, 1959
BIO
Dr. Elsaidi was born in 1984 in Alexandria, Egypt, a 2,300-year-old city known for having housed the largest and most famous library in the ancient world. During high school, he participated in various student competitions and was awarded his school’s prestigious Student Honor Certificate in his final year. He went on to attend Alexandria University (AU)—a highly ranked institution that is the second largest in Egypt—where he was awarded the Undergraduate Distinction of Honor for four successive years and, in 2005, he earned a B.S. degree with distinction and honor, being ranked first among students in the chemistry department and fourth in the university overall.
Thanks to these achievements, he was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor in AU’s Chemistry Department the following year. (In the Egyptian system, an individual enters the tenure track before receiving the Ph.D.) In that position, Elsaidi honed his skills as an educator, as a result earning the top student evaluations not only in the department but in the university as a whole for four straight years. Then, in 2011, Elsaidi was offered a scholarship by the University of South Florida (USF) to pursue his Ph.D., where Elsaidi remained as a teaching and research assistant in the chemistry department until 2014. Dr. Sameh Elsaidi completed his doctorate in less than four years with a focus on the design and synthesis of metal-organic frameworks and their applications to the separation of gases.
Dr. Elsaidi's research has received various forms of recognition. Thus he was awarded a U.S. patent for a novel class of porous materials that have demonstrated a unique capacity to capture and separate CO2. Elsaidi has presented this and other research at several high-level conferences and has received a number of awards and fellowships. his teaching has also received recognition, in particular in the form of an award and certificate from USF for my work as a graduate mentor for the undergraduate research program.
Following graduation, in 2015, Elsaidi returned to his position at Alexandria University. His first initiative was to introduce two new undergraduate courses and one new masters-level course. Dr. Elsaidi then returned to the United States in order to lead a collaborative effort between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and AU, having been awarded two fellowships by the former institution to fund these joint projects, serving as a visiting assistant professor and research scholar from September 2014 to April 2015 and again from November 2015 to June 2017. As a result of this collaborative research, Elsaidi published 18 joint papers with researchers at the PNNL and AU as well as others at the University of California-Berkeley, the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Limerick, the University of Milan, the University of Singapore, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and IMDEA Materials.
Before joining the Department of Chemistry at Illinois Institute of Technology, Dr. Elsaidi worked as a Research Scientist at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). His research focuses on the design, synthesis, and applications of functional porous materials, composite materials, and multicomponent membranes. He has over 30 publications and one patent in the field of metal-organic frameworks and their composites for gas separations (CO2, Xe, Kr), aqueous separations (rare-earth elements), gas storage (H2 and CH4), and nuclear waste management (TcO4-, Xe, Kr, Cs+, radiation-resistant materials) and their processing in the form of monoliths, thin-films, membranes, and core-shell composites. His contributions to the field have been recognized by over 1200 citations, an h-index of 18, and several featured works. His recent work has been featured on MIT news "Novel gas-capture approach advances nuclear fuel management | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology", the front page of the Premiere Issue of NETL's Carbon Capture Newsletter "https://netl.doe.gov/sites/default/files/publication/NETL-October-2020-Carbon-Capture-Newsletter.pdf", the NETL's news "Novel Carbon Capture Technology is More than the Sum of its Parts | netl.doe.gov" and the PNNL's news "Form Damages Function and Magnetism Suffers" Dr. Elsaidi was the conference chair and organizer of the "Smartly Engineered Materials International Meeting 2021". In 2017, he organized the International Conference on Chemistry Progress for Sustainable Development in Egypt. He chaired a session on "Chemistry of Materials: Metal Organic Frameworks" at the 2019 ACS meeting. He is also a guest editor for a special issue of Membranes titled "Advances in MOF-based Membranes".
RECENT NEWS
INVITED TALK AT MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT)
Thursday, October 24, 2019 at 12:00pm to 2:00pm
35-308 77 Massachusetts Avenue
Engineered Porous Materials: Growth and Separation of Noble Gases and Critical Materials
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, CA, USA, October 2019, (Host: Professor Ju Li, MIT)
DR. ELSAIDI VISITED UC-BERKELEY ON SUMMER 2019
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OUR RECENT WORK GOT ACCEPTED IN NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
RADIATION-RESISTANT METAL-ORGANIC FRAMEWORK ENABLES EFFICIENT SEPARATION OF KRYPTON FISSION GAS FROM SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL
June 18th, 2020
Abstract
Capture and storage of volatile radionuclides that result from processing of used nuclear fuel is a major challenge. Solid adsorbents, in particular ultra-microporous metal-organic frameworks, could be effective in capturing these volatile radionuclides, including 85Kr. However, metal-organic frameworks are found to have higher affinity for xenon than for krypton, and have comparable affinity for Kr and N2. Also, the adsorbent needs to have high radiation stability. To address these challenges, here we evaluate a series of ultra-microporous metal-organic frameworks, SIFSIX-3-M (M = Zn, Cu, Ni, Co, or Fe) for their capability in 85Kr separation and storage using a two-bed breakthrough method. These materials were found to have higher Kr/N2 selectivity than current benchmark materials, which leads to a notable decrease in the nuclear waste volume. The materials were systematically studied for gamma and beta irradiation stability, and SIFSIX-3-Cu is found to be the most radiation resistant.
RECENT NEWS
INVITED TALK AT FLORIDA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
November 2019
“Task-Specific Porous Materials and Membranes: From Academic Laboratory to the Commercial Marketplace” Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA, November 2019 (Host: Dr. Alexander Schoedel, FIT)
INVITED TALK AT ENERGY FRONTIER RESEARCH CENTER, UC-BERKELEY
July 2019
“Custom-Formulated Mixed-Matrix Membranes for Post-Combustion Carbon Capture” Energy Frontier Research Center, Berkeley, CA, USA, July 2019 (Host: Professor Jeffery Long, UC-Berkeley)
OUR RECENT WORK GOT ACCEPTED IN CELL REPORTS PHYSICAL SCIENCE (CELL PRESS)
DUAL-LAYER MOF COMPOSITE MEMBRANES WITH TUNED INTERFACE INTERACTION FOR POSTCOMBUSTION CARBON DIOXIDE SEPARATION
Published: May 20, 2020
Summary
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have immense potential as sorbents and inorganic membranes for CO2 separation. However, the trade-off between selectivity and adsorption capacity or permeability remains a challenge. Here, we present the fabrication of MOF core-shell particles and dual-layer membranes that show enhanced CO2/N2 separation performance compared with individual MOF materials. A highly selective MOF layer with narrow pore size is grown on the surface of a highly permeable MOF layer with large pore size. Chemical binding at the interface between the two MOFs makes it possible to form a continuous defect-free shell layer on the surface of the core or base layer. The two dual-layer MOF@MOF membranes, SIFSIX-3-Ni@SIFSIX-1-Cu and SIFSIX-3-Ni@HKUST-1, represent the first examples of pure inorganic membranes constructed from different MOFs with lattice mismatch. The CO2/N2 selectivity of the HKUST-1 and SIFSIX-1-Cu membranes is improved from 5.7 to 13.4 and 2.3 to 7.4, respectively, after the growth of a selective layer of SIFSIX-3-Ni.
Elsaidi, S. K.;* Venna, S.; Mohamed, M. H.; Hopkinson, D. “Dual-Layer MOF Composite Membranes with Rationally Tuned Interface Interaction for Post-combustion CO2 Separation” Cell Reports Physical Science (Just Accepted)
RECENT NEWS
INVITED AT FLORIDA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
November 2019
“Task-Specific Porous Materials and Membranes: From Academic Laboratory to the Commercial Marketplace” Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA, November 2019 (Host: Dr. Alexander Schoedel, FIT)
INVITED TALK AT ENERGY FRONTIER RESEARCH CENTER, UC-BERKELEY
July 2019
“Custom-Formulated Mixed-Matrix Membranes for Post-Combustion Carbon Capture” Energy Frontier Research Center, Berkeley, CA, USA, July 2019 (Host: Professor Jeffery Long, UC-Berkeley)
OUR RECENT WORK GOT ACCEPTED IN ACS MATERIALS LETTERS
Publication Date:February 11, 2020
Elsaidi, S. K.; Ongari, D.; Xu, W.; Mohamed, M. H.; Haranczyk, M.; Motkuri, R. K.; Thallapally, P. K. “Metal Organic Frameworks for Xenon Storage Applications” ACS Materials Letters 2020, 2, 233-238
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsmaterialslett.9b00468