2023 Technical Courses

Dr. Jeffrey Stryker is Professor of Chemistry and CSO of Dark Matter Materials Inc., a company he co-founded with Dr. Robin Hamilton and business partners. Dr. Stryker was born in Bloomington, Indiana and holds BA, MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities. He was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in transition metal organometallic chemistry, where he reported the first rigorously characterized product of methane C?H activation by a metal complex. Dr. Robin Hamilton was born in Sioux Lookout, Ontario and obtained his BSc (Hon) and MSc degrees from Lakehead University. He earned his doctorate in catalysis from Prof. Steve Bergens and subsequently joined the Stryker group as an NSERC PDF. He is co-principal investigator on the group’s AI-CRIN Carbon Fibre Grand Challenge grant. Prof. Stryker’s expertise encompasses homogeneous, heterogeneous, and electrochemical catalysis, synthetic, mechanistic, and supramolecular chemistry, and carbon materials science. He and Dr. Hamilton have partnered to design and develop unprecedented earth-abundant catalysts capable of driving energy-intensive transformations that otherwise require precious or strategic metal catalysts or proceed only under extreme conditions. Fifteen years ago, Prof. Stryker was drafted into the dark world of petroleum by Prof. Murray Gray. Together with Prof. Rik Tywinski they developed and proved a radical new model for asphaltene structure and aggregation at the molecular level, upending decades of consensus in the field. From this understanding, Drs. Stryker and Hamilton turned their attention toward solving the big problems of big oil. DMM was incorporated to commercialize electrochemical conversion of bitumen to high value carbon materials: CQDs, graphene, carbon mesophase, and blended pitches for producing graphene-reinforced fibre. DMM’s carbon upcycling technology permanently sequesters and monetizes carbon waste streams ?" asphaltenes, vacuum bottoms, and petcoke. But some of the catalysts DMM built for electrochemistry do much more."