Professor Zou’s lab is mainly engaged in the research of design, preparation and large-scale application of functional porous materials. In virtue of the intrinsic properties of porous materials such as high specific surface areas, adjustable pore structures and rich surficial/interfacial chemical environments, Zou’s Lab focuses on the basic scientific problems and key technical bottlenecks in industrial applications of functional porous materials towards electrochemical energy storage and conversion, intelligent thermal management and high-efficiency gas separation. Their main achievements include: (1) the research group proposed a new strategy of constructing novel nobel-metal free electrocatalysts, and obtained a series of novel nanoporous carbon nanocomposites utilizing metal-organic frameworks as self-sacrificial templates and precursors, which exhibited promising application prospects in energy storage and conversion fields such as high-power long-life batteries, fuel cells and hydrogen production from water electrolysis; (2) The research group invented a new technology of producing phase-change energy storage and thermal management materials utilizing molecular nanoconfinement effects. Three-dimensional nanoporous frameworks are employed to encapsulate and functionalize phase change materials, so as to realize highly efficient electrothermal and photothermal energy conversion and utilization. Such technology successfully solved the technical bottlenecks of phase change materials in industrial applications such as leakage, supercooling and low thermoconductivity, and the developed materials have been successfully applied to practical applications including phase-change temperature-controlling floor boards, innovative winter-heating systems and phase-change fabrics; (3) this group also developed a synthetic technology of novel multifunctional micro-mesoporous materials and realized their applications in efficient separation and storage of hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Professor Ruqiang Zou, the group leader, is currently a distinguished Boya professor of Peking University, Communist Party Secretary and Dean of School of Materials Science and Engineering, Dean of Institute of Clean Energy, and Chief Scientist of National key R&D plan of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. He was awarded as JSPS research scientist (DC) in Japan, Director's Postdoctoral Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, the National Outstanding Young Scientist of National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Top-Notch Young Professional of China, Changjiang Young Scholar of the Ministry of Education of China, Clarivate Analytics’ Global Highly-Cited Researcher, and World’s Top 2% Scientist and other important honors and awards. He has published more than 270 SCI papers ( >50 papers as highly-cited and hot papers), 6 book chapters. He was invited to give more than 50 invitation talks all over the world. He is currently the editorial board member and/or guest editor of EnergyChem, Chinese Chemical Letters, Scientific Reports, Advanced Energy Materials, APL Materials and so on. He is also appointed as the Secretary General of the professional committee of Energy Chemistry and the Executive Deputy Secretary General of the professional committee of Nano Materials and Devices in China.