Matthew Kanan

Matt Kanan is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Director of the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford. Matt’s research addresses challenges in catalysis and synthetic chemistry with applications in energy conversion, sustainable resource utilization, carbon negative technology, and human health. His group has invented processes that utilize CO₂ to streamline the synthesis of commodity chemicals and polymers, developed technology for point-of-care blood ammonia analysis, and pioneered the study of grain boundary effects on heterogeneous electrocatalysis. Matt was recently named a Dreyfus Environmental Postdoctoral Mentor (2016), one of the Talented 12 by Chemical & Engineering News (2015), and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar (2014). Prior to joining Stanford in 2009, Matt did his Ph.D. studies in organic chemistry at Harvard and postdoctoral research at MIT in inorganic chemistry.