Dr Zhehao Sun
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About
Zhehao Sun is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University (ANU).
His research focuses on the programmable control of catalytic microenvironments for solar-driven energy conversion, with particular emphasis on plasmonic architectures as governing regulators of energy utilization at catalytic interfaces. His work aims to address a central limitation in energy conversion systems—inefficient coupling of absorbed energy to surface reactions—by engineering plasmonic near-fields, charge transport, and nanoscale heat generation, and by harnessing their interplay with lattice-misfit strain, surface polarization, doping and defects from catalysts as controllable, cooperative reaction parameters rather than secondary effects.
To date, Dr. Sun has published 70 SCI-indexed papers, including 30 first/co-first-author articles in leading journals such as Nature Synthesis, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matter, Advanced Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, etc. His work has been cited over 2,600 times (h-index = 28), including two ESI Highly Cited Papers, reflecting sustained international impact in plasmonic catalysis, microenvironment engineering, and data-driven materials design.
Affiliations
Research interests
Dr. Sun integrates experiments, theoretical modelling, high-throughput density functional theory (DFT), electromagnetic simulations, and data-driven approaches to establish structure–microenvironment–function relationships in functional nanomaterials. His research provides generalizable principles for regulating reaction energetics, pathways, selectivity, and stability beyond material-specific optimization, enabling scalable energy conversion under realistic conditions such as seawater environments.