Nina Kosian wins Best Poster Award

Green hydrogen production through iron oxide electrocatalysts

Nina Kosian, PhD researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials (MPI-SusMat), has been awarded the Best Poster Award at the Microscopy Conference MC2025 in Karlsruhe. She presented her research on iron oxide thin films, exploring how their microstructure can be tailored to act as efficient and sustainable electrocatalysts for green hydrogen production.

“I’m very happy to receive the Best Poster Award. Many thanks to my supervisor Lilian Vogl, who gave me great input for this presentation and showed me how to use and combine the different microscopy techniques I need for my research”, says Kosian. Green hydrogen is a promising clean energy source, but large-scale production remains challenging. One of the key challenges is the development of efficient electrocatalysts that speed up the chemical reactions needed to produce hydrogen. Today, most catalysts rely on costly noble or rare-earth metals. Iron oxides could offer a cheaper, more sustainable alternative, as they are abundant and environmentally friendly, but their catalytic performance still needs improvement. “I adjusted the deposition parameters for reactive magnetron sputtering to grow different types of iron oxide thin films with varying oxide phases, grain sizes and shapes”, explains Kosian. The award pointed out her combination of different scale-bridging techniques like X-ray diffraction, transmission and scanning electron microscopy to characterize the thin films and see how the structure of the films influences their catalytic performance.

Looking ahead, Kosian aims to study how the microstructure of iron oxide thin films evolves during electrocatalysis and how this affects hydrogen production. Her findings could pave the way for designing more efficient, sustainable and cheaper catalysts and accelerating the shift towards sustainable hydrogen technologies.