Catalysis in action: a few short stories

In this talk, an overview of the attempts to design various solid catalysts for industrially important chemical conversions is given. These reactions include conversion of biomass derived platform chemicals to other value-added chemicals, lower alkane activation and CO2 activation. We try to understand how the structural aspects of catalysts affect the reactivity, which is crucial in developing better catalysts. For this purpose, we try to make use of various characterization techniques. Recent results from our work in this direction will be described, taking a few examples.