Recently, our research group made important progress in the field of catalytic conversion of biomass and published a paper entitled "Efficient one-pot transformation of furfural to pentanediol over Cu-modified cobalt-based catalysts" in Bioresource Technology, a leading journal in the field of biomass. Wang Feng is the first author. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province.

Furfural is the only biomass-based chemical that can be completely extracted from agricultural and forestry wastes and has been industrialized. The further catalytic conversion of furfural to biobased diols is an important topic in the field of biomass utilization. In this work, a kind of copper-modified cerium dioxide supported cobalt catalyst was prepared, and the one-step conversion of furfural into 1, 5-pentanediol, a polyester monomer with huge market application prospect, was realized under mild conditions, and the product yield reached 53.4%, achieving a new breakthrough in non-precious metal catalysis of this reaction, which is the best result reported so far. In this study, abundant oxygen vacancies were constructed on the surface of the catalyst through a clever synthesis strategy, and the defect of low activity of traditional non-precious metals was improved through oxygen vacancy mediated hydrogen overflow, which significantly improved the activity of the catalyst, and had important industrial application value for further development of the biomass route to prepare pentadiols. Recently, this innovation has applied for a national invention patent.

In recent years, our research group has achieved a series of high-level achievements in the field of catalytic conversion of biomass and its platform compounds. Relevant papers were published in Appl.Catal.B: Environ., Green Chem., Chem. Eng. J., Bioresource Technol., J. Energy Chem., Green Energy Environ., and so on. Our work has received high attention from international peers.