Rate My Professor Scott Barton

Scott Calabrese Barton is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in the College of Engineering at Michigan State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Columbia University (1999), an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1991), and a B.A. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Notre Dame (1989). Barton's research specializes in electrochemical engineering, focusing on catalysis and transport in electrochemical energy systems from both experimental and theoretical perspectives. He leads the SCB Group, which develops materials for proton exchange membrane fuel cells, direct methanol fuel cells, and biofuel cells, applicable across scales from microwatts to kilowatts with low environmental impact. His investigations include multiscale simulations of electrocatalytic materials, electrostatic channeling in enzymatic cascades, molecular dynamics for substrate transfer efficiency, and confinement effects in nanoscale tunnels on diffusion of small molecules like ethanol and oxalate.

Barton's key contributions encompass biological fuel cell design, transition metal catalysis for oxygen reduction, and modeling of reaction-transport interactions in high-surface-area electrodes using redox biocatalysts. Prominent publications include 'Enzymatic biofuel cells for implantable and microscale devices' (Chemical Reviews, 2004), 'Markov State Study of Electrostatic Channeling within the Tricarboxylic Acid Cycle Supercomplex' (ACS Nanosci. Au, 2022), 'Infrequent metadynamics study of rare-event electrostatic channeling' (Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 2021), 'Confinement and Diffusion of Small Molecules in a Molecular-Scale Tunnel' (Journal of the Electrochemical Society, 2020), 'Markov-State Transition Path Analysis of Electrostatic Channeling' (Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 2019), 'Cascade Kinetics of an Artificial Metabolon by Molecular Dynamics and Kinetic Monte Carlo' (ACS Catalysis, 2018), and 'Finite difference model of electrostatic channeling in TCA cycle enzymes' (Electrochimica Acta, 2025). In 2025, he was elected Fellow of the Electrochemical Society for his scientific achievements in energy generation and storage, technological contributions, and service to the society. Barton also received Graduate Awards in 2019-20 and recognition at the 2018 Engineering Graduate Research Symposium.