Short CV:
Dr. HUO Fengwei is an Assistant Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University. He obtained his B.S. degree in Chemistry, at Jilin University in 1999. He then continued his master research there, supervised by by Prof. Xi Zhang. In 2003, he joined Prof. Chad A. Mirkin’s group for his PhD study in chemistry at Northwestern University and obtained PhD degree in 2009. The current research of Dr. Huo’s group involves nanolithography, functional nanomaterials, and metallic-organic frameworks (MOFs) materials. One goal of his team is to explore the application of high throughput nanolithography approaches (polymer pen lithography, beam pen lithography, etc), such as fabrication of nano devices, biochips, optical materials, metamaterials, etc. The other field of this group is to design and develop MOFs/nanoparticles composite materials for solar fuels research, hydrogen storage and chemical catalysis studies. He is the author of over twenty publications, including Science, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Chemistry and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Imparting Functionality to Metal-Organic Framework Materials by Controlled Nanomaterials Encapsulation
Fengwei Huo
School of Materials Science and Engineering,
Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Ave. 639808, Singapore
E-mail Address: fwhuo@ntu.edu.sg

   Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are microporous materials synthesized through assembling
metal ions with organic ligands. MOFs have crystalline structures and are typically characterized by large internal surface areas, uniform but tunable cavities, and tailorable chemistry. MOFs have shown great promise for a variety of applications, including gas storage, chemical separation, catalysis and sensing.
  Particularly, the incorporation of nanoparticles in MOFs has attracted great attention because of the benefits of the novel chemical and physical properties exhibited by certain classes of nanoparticles.
  Although many reports on nanoparticle/MOF composites and their applications appeared, this emerging area is characterized by significant challenges. Recently, we developed an encapsulation strategy that allows any of several types of nanoparticles to be fully incorporated within crystals of a readily synthesized zeolitic imidazolate framework material, ZIF-8, in a well-dispersed fashion. In contrast to previous reports in which nanoparticles were used as seeds to induce the nucleation of MOF crystals, our strategy relies on the successive adsorption of nanoparticles onto the continuously forming surfaces of the growing MOF crystals. This allows ready control over the spatial distribution of nanoparticles within ZIF-8 crystals by adjusting the time of nanoparticle addition during the MOF-formation reaction. The asprepared hybrid materials exhibit both active (catalytic, magnetic, and optical) properties deriving from the incorporated nanoparticles and size- and alignment-selective behavior (i.e., molecular sieving and regioselective guest reactivity) originating from the well-defined microporous nature of the MOF component.