Professor Marc Porosoff is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester. He received his BS in 2009 and MS in 2010, both in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2015, he completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Columbia University under the supervision of Prof. Jingguang G. Chen. He then worked as a National Research Council sponsored postdoctoral fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory on the seawater to fuel project. Porosoff has been awarded funding by the Office of Naval Research, American Chemical Society-Petroleum Research Fund, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. In 2026, he was appointed to the Early Career Board of the journal, EES Catalysis. At Rochester, Porosoff investigates relationships between chemical reactivity and catalyst electronic/structure properties through catalyst synthesis, in situ analytical techniques, and reactor studies. He is also working on new mechanisms of catalyst representation and energy transfer to accelerate development and implementation of carbon-neutral processes in the 21st century. Porosoff is also a co-host of PodCAT, a catalysis podcast that helps early-career researchers navigate academia.
Read Marc’s Emerging Investigator article titled “Leveraging and understanding exotherms in tandem catalysts with in situ luminescence thermometry” and find out more about him in the interview below:
How has your research evolved from your first article to this most recent one?
At the beginning of my independent research career at the University of Rochester, I really didn’t have the confidence to pursue new and “risky” research directions. I started off by following a similar approach to my PhD and postdoc, which was to develop an understanding of catalyst structure-property relationships by combining in situ analytical techniques and reactor experiments. In one of my group’s first articles, we led a study on scaling up a potassium-promoted molybdenum carbide catalyst for the reverse water-gas shift reaction to understand catalyst scalability and lifetime (which coincidentally was published in Energy and Environmental Science). However, as my career has evolved, my group’s questions have shifted from understanding materials to developing approaches that deepen our understanding of catalytic systems. The luminescence thermometry work (published in EES Catalysis) is a good example because instead of designing a new catalyst, we are probing nuanced effects of surface temperatures that are known to affect reaction kinetics but have not yet been leveraged to more precisely control reaction networks and tandem reactions.
What aspect of your work excites you most right now?
The most exciting part of my group’s research is leveraging new tools. It has been over 100 years since the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia was developed, but the catalyst development and deployment paradigm is more or less unchanged. We are working at the intersection of AI and reactor design to modernize catalyst discovery and development. My group has shown that representing catalysts with the text of synthesis procedures and reaction conditions, instead of typical computational descriptors, can be used to make valid predictions and discover new catalysts. We are also working on Joule-heated reactors, which will help enable distributed deployment of chemical conversion technologies rather than relying on entrenched infrastructure. The tools we are working on may also help with reproducibility in heterogeneous catalysis via text-based representation. This is because the representation is the text-based procedure itself, so when two labs get different results, the discrepancy can be localized to specific variables that may not be reported in publications, such as chemical lot numbers, humidity, and thermocouple placement. Therefore, our use of language-based representation can potentially transform frustrating outcomes into quantifiable values and actionable procedures.
Which profession would you choose if you weren’t a scientist?
A chef. I did an internship in a kitchen in high school. Cooking is well aligned with research because there is an element of creativity, hypothesis generation, and many opportunities for improvement (via failure). You also get a tangible result in the end, but the satisfaction and results from cooking are appreciated on a much shorter timescale than in research.
What one piece of career advice would you share with other early career scientists?
This may seem like a strange answer, but don’t take everyone’s advice. Over your career you’ll get an enormous amount of advice, and some of it will be contradictory. Two of your mentors may have vastly different opinions about how to approach research or run a lab. There are a lot of pathways to becoming a successful scientist, so my advice is to trust your gut and listen to what resonates with you. Let your intuition guide your decisions, rather than overhauling your research approach every time someone senior gives you advice.
