14th International conference on materials chemistry (MC14)

Prof. Nicholas A. Kotov is working on conceptual foundations and technical realizations of biomimetic nanostructures. Examples of scientific advances in this area associated with his works include pioneering studies on graphene- and clay-based layered biomimetic nanocomposites, self-organization of nanoparticles, chiral nanomaterials, and omnidispersible colloids.  His contribution to technology include ultrastrong nacre-mimetic nanocomposites, soft neuroprosthetic implants, 3D tissue replicas for drug-testing, chiral biosensors, and cartilage-like electrolytes for batteries. Prof. Kotov is a founder of several start-up companies that commercialized bioinspired nanomaterials for biomedical, military, energy, and automotive technologies. 

Bettina V. Lotsch studied Chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and the University of Oxford and received her PhD from LMU Munich in 2006. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Toronto as a Feodor-Lynen fellow she was appointed assistant professor at LMU Munich in 2009 (tenure 2014). In 2011, she became leader of an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart while being professor at LMU.
Since 2017 Bettina is Director and head of the Nanochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research.
 
Her research explores the rational synthesis of new materials by combining the tools of molecular, solid-state and nanochemistry. Focal points include “smart” photonic crystals for optical sensing, porous frameworks for photocatalysis, solid electrolytes for Li ion batteries and soft chemistry routes towards 2D materials.
Bettina was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2014) and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2014. Her work has been recognized by a number of awards, most recently by the EU-40 Materials Prize 2017 of the European Materials Research Society

Ian Manners is Canadian and British and was born in London, England. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, he conducted postdoctoral work in Germany and then in the USA. He then joined the University of Toronto, Canada as an Assistant Professor in 1990 and was promoted to Full Professor in 1995 and was made a Canada Research Chair in 2001. In 2006 he returned to his Alma Mater to take up a Chair in Inorganic, Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry supported by an EU Marie Curie Chair. His research interests broadly focus on synthetic problems at molecular, macromolecular, and longer length scales and currently involve catalytic main group chemistry and main group polymers, functional metallopolymers, and crystallization-driven self-assembly processes. He is the recipient of a range of awards including a Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (from the US), the Steacie Prize (from Canada), the RSC Award in Main Group Chemistry, the RSC Peter Day Award for Soft Matter Materials Chemistry (2012), and a Humboldt Research Award from Germany (2011). He is an elected member of both the Canadian and the British National Academies of Science. His work is documented in over 650 career publications and 4 books and has been presented in over 500 invited and plenary lectures worldwide. 

 Nam-Gyu Park is professor and SKKU-Fellow at School of Chemical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from Seoul National University in 1988, 1992 and 1995, respectively. He worked at ICMCB-CNRS, France, from 1996 to 1997 and at National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA, from 1997 to 1999 as postdoctoral researchers. He worked as Director of Solar Cell Research Center at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) from 2005 to 2009 and as a principal scientist at Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) from 2000 to 2005 before joining Sungkyunkwan University as a full professor in 2009. He has been doing researches on high efficiency mesoscopic nanostructured solar cells since 1997. He is pioneer of solid state perovskite solar cell, which was first developed in 2012. He was selected as a New Class of Nobel Prize-Worthy Scientists in September 20, 2017 and included in 3,300 highly cited researchers (top 1% scientists) in November 15, 2017 by Clarivate Analytics. He is a fellow of Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) since 2017.

Nicola Spaldin is the professor of materials theory at ETH Zurich. She developed the class of materials known as multiferroics, which combine simultaneous ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity, for which she received the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award among other honors. She is a passionate science educator, director of her department’s study program, and holder of the ETH Golden Owl Award for excellence in teaching. When not trying to make a room-temperature superconductor, she can be found playing her clarinet, or skiing or climbing in the Alps.

The academic career of Fraser Stoddart can be traced through thick and thin from the Athens of the North to the Windy City beside Lake Michigan with interludes on the edge of the Canadian Shield beside Lake Ontario, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, on the Plains of Cheshire beside the Wirral, in the Midlands of the Heartland of Albion, and in the City of the Angels beside the Peaceful Sea. He has been a member of the faculty at Northwestern University since 2008. He is a Board of Trustees Professor and Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems. His research interests are in chemistry beyond the molecule, which, combined with his interest in templation, has led to the template-directed synthesis, based on molecular recognition and self-assembly processes, of a wide range of mechanically interlocked molecules, bistable variants of which have found their way in the form of switches into molecular electronic devices and drug delivery systems. In terms of molecular structure, his research straddles the size regime from the mesomolecular scale all the way up to the nanoscopic, microscopic and macroscopic levels: it includes wholly synthetic polymers and metal-organic frameworks. He also embraces radical chemistry in both the supramolecular and mechanostereochemical domains

William Dichtel received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from MIT, where he performed research with Prof. Tim Swager. Dichtel obtained his Ph.D. degree from UC-Berkeley under Prof. Jean M. J. Fréchet. He was a joint postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Fraser Stoddart, UCLA, and Prof. James Heath, Caltech. He began his independent academic career at Cornell University in 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. In 2016, he took sabbatical at UC-Berkeley as a Visiting Miller Professor and then moved to Northwestern University as the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry. The unifying theme of Dichtel’s research is the use of organic synthesis to control the structure and reactivity of molecules, materials, and interfaces across chemical environments. His research has expanded the study of polymerization processes into the second and third dimensions in an emerging class of polymers known as covalent organic frameworks (COFs).
 
Dichtel’s research has been recognized by nationally and internationally. He received the NSF CAREER Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award, ACS Cope Scholar Award, National Fresenius Award, and the IUPAC/Polymer International Award. Dichtel was also the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the Doolittle Award, the Baekeland Award, and recently the FRED Cottrell Award.

Dr. Coudert is a Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), where his group applies computational chemistry methods at various scales to investigate the physical and chemical properties of nanoporous materials, and in particular stimuli-responsive materials with anomalous behaviour. He obtained his PhD from the University Paris-Sud (France) in 2007, for his work on the properties of water and solvated electrons confined in zeolite nanopores. He worked as post-doctoral researcher at University College London (UK) on the growth of metal-organic frameworks on surfaces, before joining CNRS in 2008. He has received the Early-Career Researcher award from the French Physical Chemistry division, was named a Distinguished Junior Member of the French Chemical Society, and was awarded the 2018 International Award for Creative Work by the Japan Society of Coordination Chemistry.

Guosong Chen is a professor in Department of Macromolecular Sciences, Fudan University. Her current research focus is carbohydrate-based macromolecular self-assembly and its biological functions. She received Excellent Youth Foundation from NSFC in 2013. As corresponding author, she published more than 40 papers in J. Am. Chem. Soc., Nature Communications, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Adv. Materials and other journals. She was elected as Fellow of Royal Chemical Society (FRSC) and serves as Associate Editor of ACS Macro Letters and international board member for Polymer Chemistry, Bioconjugate Chemistry, Polymer International etc.

Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering at University of Massachusetts Boston. She obtained her S.B. in Chemistry from MIT in 1994 and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 in the group of A. Paul Alivisatos. Following this, she was a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab. She joined MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Biological Engineering as a faculty member from 2002-2012. From 2012-2015 she was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Bioengineering Systems and Technologies Group. Since 2015 she has been a founding member of the Mechanical Engineering Program at UMass Boston and holds a visiting scientist position at MIT. She has received an ONR Young Investigator Award, was named a Fellow of the Foresight Institute in 2017.

Paul Saines is a lecturer in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Kent.  He received a BSc. (2004) and PhD (2008) in solid state chemistry from the University of Sydney. This was followed by a postdoc at the University of Cambridge and a Glasstone fellowship at the University of Oxford, before moving to Kent in 2015. The research in his group primarily focuses on the synthesis and characterisation of ferroic, chiefly magnetic, materials that combine inorganic and organic building blocks into extended structures. This includes interests in multiferroics, low dimensional and frustrated magnetism, with a particular focus on probing how these properties originate from the atomic scale structure of these materials. He was awarded an Australian Institute for Nuclear Science and Engineering Gold Medal in 2009 and the Institute of Physics Physical Crystallography prize in 2015 for this work.

Neil Champness is the Professor of Chemical Nanoscience at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research spans chemical nanoscience and molecular organization. In particular he focusses on molecular design and synthetic methods, employing self-assembly to create framework materials on surfaces and in the solid-state and for the creation of interlocked structures in solution. His research achievements have been recognised by the award of a number of Royal Society of Chemistry prizes including the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize (2006), Supramolecular Chemistry Award (2010) and Surfaces and Interfaces Award (2016). He held a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship (2010) and a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2011-2016). He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). In 2011 he was identified as one of the top 100 most cited chemists of the previous decade worldwide and has been designated a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher.

Luis M. Liz-Marzán is a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela (1992) and has been postdoc at Utrecht University and (more recently) visiting professor at several Universities and research centres worldwide. He joined the University of Vigo in 1995, where he became Full Professor in Physical Chemistry in 2006. In 2012 he moved to the Basque Centre of Cooperative Research in Biomaterials (CIC biomaGUNE), in San Sebastián, where he is Ikerbasque Research Professor and Scientific Director. He is co-editor of 2 books, co-author of over 400 publications and 8 patents, and has received several national and international research awards. He is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC). His current interests include nanoparticle synthesis and assembly, nanoplasmonics, and development of nanoparticle-based sensing and diagnostic tools, including SERS detection and imaging.

Nico Sommerdijk is full professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and head of the Laboratory of Materials and Interface Chemistry. In 1995 he obtained his PhD (Cum Laude) from the University of Nijmegen for his work on chiral amphiphiles. He did postdoctoral work on sol-gel silicates (1995-1997, University of Kent-UK), on bio-inspired crystallization (1997, Keel University-UK) and on macromolecular self-assembly (1997-1998, Nijmegen-NL). In 1999 he moved to Eindhoven to work on bio-inspired hybrid materials through biomimetic mineralization and self- organization. He studies these processes combining (macro)molecular self-assembly and advanced electron microscopy. Prof. Sommerdijk’s work has been supported by VIDI and VICI Awards from the Netherlands Science Foundation,  , he is winner of the RSC Soft Mater and Biophysics Award 2015, and received an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant in 2018, He is winner of the RSC Soft Mater and Biophysics Award 2015. He is director of Center of Multiscale Electron Microscopy (www.cryotem.com) , core member of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems, member of the Eindhoven Polymer Laboratories and the Eindhoven Multiscale Institute.

Cameron Alexander is Professor of Polymer Therapeutics, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Fellow, an EPSRC Impact Fellow, and Head of the Division of Molecular Therapeutics and Formulation at the School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham, UK.
Professor Alexander received degrees (BSc and PhD) in Chemistry from the University of Durham, UK and carried out post-doctoral research at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis, University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Higher Education Academy, Chair of the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team for Physical Sciences and a recent (2009-2014) EPSRC Leadership Fellow.  Prof Alexander has published ~ 200 refereed articles in areas ranging from drug delivery and regenerative medicine to synthetic biology, receiving nearly 9000 citations to date. From 2006-2016, Professor Alexander led the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Advanced Therapeutics and Nanomedicines at Nottingham and University College London with leading pharmaceutical industry partners. He received the Royal Society of Chemistry Macro Group Medal 2014 for contributions to polymer science.
Professor Alexander has been fortunate to work with scientists from more than 20 countries in his research group and is proud to serve the RSC as Chair of the Macro Group UK.

Eva Unger is an assistant senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Lund University in Sweden as well as a Young Investigator Group Leader at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy and affiliated with the Department of Chemistry at Humboldt University in Germany. She completed her PhD studies in excitonic hybrid solar cell research at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Funded by a research fellowship from the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, Eva Unger carried out postdoctoral research at Stanford University on the emerging metal-halide perovskite solar cells. In 2014, she joined Lund University, Sweden, as an independent postdoctoral researcher where she is employed as an assistant senior lecturer since 2016 and collaborates with researchers to study the photophysics of metal-halide perovskites. Meanwhile, she has been working as a guest scientist funded by an International Career Grant from the Swedish Research Council cofounded by Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, Germany. Since spring 2017, Eva Unger is leading a Young Investigator Group at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to investigate the formation of metal-halide perovskites and scale device technology to larger areas.

Will Chueh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and a Center Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. He leads a group of more than thirty tackling the challenge of decarbonizing various energy transformation pathways. He received his B.S. in Applied Physics, M.S. and Ph.D. (2010) in Materials Science from Caltech. Prior to joining Stanford in 2012, he was a Distinguished Truman Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. Prof. Chueh has received numerous honors, including the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2018), Volkswagen/BASF Science Award Electrochemistry (2016), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2016), Sloan Research Fellowship (2016), NSF CAREER Award (2015), Solid State Ionics Young Scientist Award (2013), Caltech Demetriades‐Tsafka‐Kokkalis Prize in Energy (2012), and the American Ceramics Society Diamond Award (2008). In 2012, he was named as one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under the Age of 35” by MIT’s Technology Review.

Matthew L. Becker is the W. Gerald Austen Endowed Chair of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering and Professor of Polymer Science and Biomedical Engineering at The University of Akron. He completed his PhD in organic chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis.  He began his independent research career at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  His multidisciplinary research team is focused on developing bioactive polymers for regenerative medicine and addressing unmet medical needs at the interface of chemistry, materials and medicine. To date, his group has published more than 130 papers and has 35 patents issued or pending. He is the founder of three start-up companies, 3D BioResins, 3D BioActives and Fortem Polymers. Professor Becker was awarded the Macromolecules-Biomacromolecules Young Investigator Award in 2015.  He is a Kavli Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering and the PMSE Division of the American Chemical Society. 

Rachel Evans is a lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge. She obtained her PhD in Physical Chemistry in 2007 from Swansea University, before undertaking postdoctoral research at the Université Paris-Sud (France) and the University of Coimbra (Portugal).  She was appointed as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) in 2011 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016, before moving to take up her current post in 2017. Rachel’s research is multidisciplinary and involves polymer, colloid and photophysical chemistry. Her current focus is the development of photoactive polymer-hybrid materials for luminescent solar devices, organic photovoltaics and stimuli-responsive membranes. In 2017 she was awarded the Dillwyn Medal for STEMM from the Learned Society of Wales and the Macro Group UK Young Researchers Medal. Rachel currently serves as Chair of the RSC Photophysics and Photochemistry Group and sits on the Member Networks committee.

Kim Jelfs is a Lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow (URF) in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London, UK. Her group specialises in the use of computer simulations to assist in the discovery of supramolecular materials. This includes the development of software to automate the assembly and testing of materials, with the application of artificial intelligence techniques. The materials studied include porous materials for molecular separations or encapsulations or materials for the generation of renewable energy. Kim completed her PhD in Computational Chemistry at UCL (UK) in 2010, studying the crystal growth of zeolitic materials. She worked as a post-doctoral researcher conducting simulations across the experimental groups at the University of Liverpool, before beginning her independent research at Imperial College in 2013. She was awarded a 2018 RSC Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize.

Magda Titirici has a PhD from University of Dortumnd, a German Habilitation from the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and University of Potsdam and is currently a Professor of Sustainable Materials Chemistry at Queen Mary University of London.
Magda is the author of around highly cited 150 publications (h-index=62) in the field of sustainable materials for energy storage and conversion, several book chapters and two edited books. She is an associate editor for J. Mater. Chem. A (RSC).
Magda has been awarded the Rosenhain Medal and Price from the Institute of Materials and Mines in London in recognition of distinguished achievements in materials science under the age of 40 in 2016, she is the USERN laureate in physical sciences 2017 as well as the recipient of an honoray PhD from University of Stockholm in 2017, the Chinese Academy of Science President’s Fellowship in 2018 as well as the Royal Society of Chemistry Corday Morgan Prize 2018.

Dr. Silvia Vignolini studied Physics at the University of Florence, Italy. In 2009, she was awarded a PhD in Solid State Physics at the European Laboratory for non-Linear Spectroscopy and the Physics Department at the University of Florence. In 2010, she moved to Cambridge as a post-doctoral research associate working in the Cavendish Laboratory and the Plant Science Department. In 2013, she started her independent research becoming a   BBSRC David Philip Fellow. Dr. Vignolini is currently a Reader in Chemistry and Bio-inspired materials in the Chemistry Department in Cambridge. Her research interest lies at the interface of chemistry, soft-matter physics, optics, and biology. In particular, her research focuses on the study of how natural materials (such as cellulose) are assembled into complex architectures within living organisms and how these architectures define the organism`s optical appearance. Her approach to fabricate novel optical materials is unique in the field of bio-mimetic and photonics. Grounded on her multidisciplinary background, Dr. Vignolini uses optics to understand the assembly of naturally occurring photonic structures and she applies those concepts to fabricate novel bio-inspired sustainable materials.