Abstract: Electrification of chemical manufacturing—enabled by increasingly inexpensive, yet inherently intermittent renewable electricity—creates opportunities for decentralized production and improved selectivity via potential-controlled kinetics. However, much industrial synthesis is performed in nonaqueous media to satisfy constraints in solubility, reactivity, catalyst compatibility, and separations. Direct nonaqueous electrochemistry remains difficult to scale because low dielectric solvents exhibit poor ionic conductivity, require costly supporting electrolytes that can contaminate products, and lack robust membrane/electrolyte architectures for stable charge balancing. Conversely, purely aqueous electrochemical routes often suffer from limited substrate solubility and/or challenging product–electrolyte separations.

In this talk, I will describe strategies to electrify nonaqueous chemistry using aqueous electrochemistry by transporting ion-electron pairs as charge-neutral fragments across engineered interfaces. I will first introduce aqueous–nonaqueous interfacial proton-coupled electron transfer (ANIPCET) as a framework that leverages mature aqueous electrodes and membranes while enabling selective transformations in a separated nonaqueous phase without electrolyte cross-contamination. In a liquid–liquid system, we successfully electrified the industrial H₂O₂ synthesis method with improved selectivity, further demonstrating high Faradaic efficiency at industrially relevant current densities while reducing metal contamination and electrolyte pollution. I will then extend the concept to aqueous–solid–nonaqueous interfaces, where electrochemically generated aqueous ion-electron pairs are transferred through a solid mediator to drive nonaqueous hydrogenations and oxidations, with tunable selectivity and mass transport.

Finally, I will connect these interfacial concepts to membrane design, introducing a unified picture of organic diffusion electrodes (ODEs) for interfacial reactivity and transport between aqueous electrochemistry and nonaqueous chemistry. The robustness of such systems is demonstrated with crossover-intolerant applications such as isotope separation. Together, these results outline a clear path of utilizing scalable aqueous electrochemical infrastructures for sustainable nonaqueous chemical production through material, interfacial and system design.

Biography: Dawei Xi is a Schmidt Science Fellow, and currently a postdoctoral fellow in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on membrane science and electrochemical interfaces. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering from Harvard University (2025), following earlier training in chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China (M.S., 2021; B.S., 2019). His research involves multiphase electrosynthesis for energy conversion, aqueous charge-carrier management for energy storage, and membrane-enabled separations. His work has been published in journals including Nature Chemistry, Nature Energy, Energy & Environmental Science, and Advanced Materials, and he is a co-inventor on multiple patent filings related to electrochemical chemical manufacturing and electrochemical carbon-management technologies.