Editorial Board
Our Editorial Board Members are active researchers recognized as experts in their field. They handle manuscripts within their areas of expertise, overseeing all aspects of the peer review process from submission to acceptance.
Editorial Board Members work closely with our in-house editors to ensure that all manuscripts are subject to the same editorial standards and journal policies.
For past members of our Editorial Board, please see our Editorial Board Alumni page.
Christian Agatemor, PhD, University of Miami, USA
Dr Christian Agatemor is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Miami, where he conducts research at the interface of chemistry and biology. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, developing bioactive dendrimers to mitigate drug-resistant microbial infections. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the United States. His expertise includes metabolic glycoengineering, the design of bioorthogonal chemical reporters to study posttranslational modifications, and the delivery of biologics. He started his independent career in August 2021, leading a research group that seeks to develop bioorthogonal chemical reporters to study posttranslational modifications, specifically protein glycosylation and lactylation. A key aspect of his research focuses on investigating how lactylation, the modification of proteins with L-lactate-derived L-lactyl units, influences cell transformation and differentiation, processes with implications for many diseases. In parallel, his research group is developing deep eutectic solvents for drug delivery and biomaterials for tissue engineering . Dr. Agatemor received the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada's postdoctoral fellowship.
Lab webpage
Canan Atilgan, PhD, Sabanci University , Turkiye
Dr. Canan Atilgan is a Professor of Materials Science and Nano Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences of Sabanci University, Türkiye. Dr. Atılgan expertise is on the computational and theoretical investigation of complex molecules. Her focus is on disclosing dynamical features of soft matter systems that lead to unique behavior identified, but not explained, through experiments. Protein dynamics, manipulation of protein conformations, understanding the antibiotic resistance problem at the scale of the three-dimensional structure of single proteins, and protein design are areas of current interest for her. She received her PhD from the Department of Chemical Engineering of Boğaziçi University in 1996. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute of Florida State University through 1999. She is an elected member of Bilim Akademisi - Science Academy, Türkiye and served as its President for the 2021-2024 term. She is an elected member of EMBO and Academia Europaea. Lab webpage
Fang Bai, PhD, Shanghai Tech University, China
Dr. Fang Bai is an assistant professor in the School of Life Science and Technology at Shanghai Tech University. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Dalian University of Technology in 2014 and completed postdoctoral training at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University. Before joining Shanghai Tech University in October 2019, she served briefly as an assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Dr. Bai's research centers on advancing computational methods for drug design, including the application of artificial intelligence algorithms. Her recent work emphasizes developing new approaches to design drugs against undruggable targets, such as protein-protein interactions, with a focus on designing degraders like molecular glues and PROTACs.
Lab webpage
Claudia Bonfio, PhD, University of Strasbourg, France
Dr Claudia Bonfio was born in Siena, a beautiful medieval city in Tuscany, mostly known for the wine produced in the surroundings. She completed her BSc and MSc studies in Chemistry and her PhD in Biomolecular Sciences in late 2017, working on the origin and catalytic activity of ancient proteins. Later, as a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow, she joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where she looked into the chemical origin of modern cells. After a short stay at the University of Cambridge as an 1851 Research Fellow, exploring prebiotic membrane signalling, she moved to ISIS in Strasbourg to start her research group. Her group is currently working on the design and development of functional primitive cells capable of Darwinian evolution.
Lab webpage
Indranath Chakraborty, PhD, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India
Dr Indranath Chakraborty is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nano Science and Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. His research group investigates the emerging properties of atomically precise nanoparticles, structure-property correlations, and their functions. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2015 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (India). He was then a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, IL, USA. In 2016, he moved to Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow. In 2018, he moved to the Center for Hybrid Nanostructure, University of Hamburg, Germany as a research associate. Before Joining IIT Kharagpur (2022), he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Basic Sciences at IIT Mandi (India). He has received numerous awards for his research contributions, including the Humboldt Fellowship, Malhotra Weikfield Foundation Nano Science Fellowship Award, and J. C Bose patent award.
Lab webpage
François-Xavier Coudert, PhD, French National Centre for Scientific Research, France
Dr Coudert is a Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, France), 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. FX 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.
Lab webpage
André Dallmann, PhD, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Dr. André Dallmann is head of the NMR department of the Chemistry institute at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He received his Dr. rer. nat. from Humboldt University in 2009 on the topic of structural and dynamic characterisation of fluorophore-labelled DNA duplex. He then moved on in 2010 to a Post-Doc at the TU Munich and Helmholtz Centre for Infectuous Diseases in the group of Prof. Dr. Michael Sattler, where he focussed on structural and dynamic investigation of functional RNA and pulse program development for Biomolecular NMR spectroscopy. From 2013 to 2014 he conducted postdoctoral research at the National Institute of Medical Research (now: Crick Institute) and University College London, where he focussed on structural investigations of the Syncrip protein RRM- and N-terminal domains. Since September 2015 he is back at the Humboldt University and focuses his research on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to structural aspects in material sciences e.g. perowskite materials and peptide mimetics; structure and dynamics of inorganic complexes; reaction pathway elucidation.
Lab webpage
Thu-Thuy Dang, PhD, The University of British Columbia, Canada
Dr. Thu-Thuy Dang is currently an assistant professor and a MSHRBC Scholar in the Chemistry Department, UBCO. She's also a UBCO Principle Research Chair in Natural Product Biosynthesis and Biotechnology. She obtained her PhD from the University of Calgary (Facchini group, Canada) and EMBO postdoc from John Innes Centre (O’Connor group, UK). She is interested in understanding how plants use enzymes to produce molecules that we use as pharmaceuticals. Her research program integrates biochemistry, chemistry, bioinformatics, and molecular genetics to understand and engineer the biosynthesis of valuable chemicals from medicinal plants.
Lab webpage
Katrin Erath-Dulitz, PhD, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Dr Erath-Dulitz is Assistant Professor of Physics at Universität Innsbruck (Austria), where her research deals with the study of chemical reactions in a regime dominated by quantum effects in order to understand fundamental reaction mechanisms as well as the chemical evolution in space. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford (UK) in 2015, for her work on the magnetic deceleration of supersonic beams for cold and controlled chemistry studies in ion traps. After a postdoc at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) on the high-resolution molecular spectroscopy of molecular cations, she continued in the field of cold and controlled chemistry at the University of Freiburg (Germany), with a focus on chemistry experiments with ultracold atoms and doped helium nanodroplets, respectively. From 2018-2022, she was a Liebig Fellow of the Union of Chemical Industry. In 2022, she was also a Fraunhofer Attract group leader in the field of laser-matter interaction at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) in Freiburg.
Lab webpage
Francesca Grisoni, PhD, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Francesca Grisoni is an Assistant Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (Department of Biomedical Engineering), where she leads the Molecular Machine Learning team. Her research focuses on developing novel artificial intelligence (AI) methods for drug discovery, at the interface between computation and experimental validation in the wet-lab. Her team works at the intersection of (and melds concepts from) chemistry, biology, and computer science, to design innovative AI approaches tailored to molecule discovery. Her final goal is to augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence, to ultimately reach ‘better decisions faster’ in the discovery of therapeutic drugs. Francesca Grisoni studied Environmental Sciences at the University of Milano-Bicocca. There she also obtained her Ph.D. in 2016, working under the supervision of Prof. R. Todeschini, with a dissertation on interpretable machine learning for molecular property prediction. During her doctoral studies, she was hosted at ETH Zurich (Dept. Chemistry and Applied Biosciences) and at the U.S. EPA (National Center of Computational Toxicology). After working as a biostatistical consultant for Bracco Pharmaceuticals, and as a data scientist in a startup company for a year, Dr. Grisoni returned to academia. From 2017 to 2019, she was a joint postdoctoral fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca and ETH Zurich, where she developed novel molecular descriptors tailored to scaffold hopping. In 2019 she joined the group of Prof. Gisbert Schneider at ETH Zurich as a senior postdoctoral researcher, where she focused on generative deep learning for drug discovery. In 2021, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the TU/e, where she currently leads the Molecular Machine Learning team. Dr. Grisoni has received several grants and awards, such as the Lush Young Researcher Prize, the Early Career Award 2022 from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and an ERC Starting Grant (2022).
Lab webpage
Felipe García, PhD, Monash University, Australia
Felipe García is originally from the coastal town of Gijón (Asturias, Spain) and earned his BSc and MSc degrees in Chemistry at the local Oviedo University. In 2001, he moved to the University of Cambridge to pursue his graduate studies on main group imides and phosphides as a Cambridge European Trust and Newton Trust Scholar under the supervision of Prof. Dominic Wright. He then obtained a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College (2005) and was appointed a College Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at Newnham and Trinity Colleges (2006) before joining Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) in 2011 as an Assistant Professor. In 2022, he returned to his alma mater under the Margarita Salas Senior Talent Attraction program funded by the Foundation for the Promotion in Asturias of Applied Scientific Research and Technology (FICYT). In 2024, he relocated to Monash University (Australia) to continue his research. Felipe has published over 100 papers on Main Group Chemistry and strives to develop new synthetic strategies for synthesizing novel compounds for industrial and biological applications.
Lab webpage
Satoshi Honda, PhD, University of Tokyo, Japan
Dr Honda is Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo (Japan), where his research focuses on the synthesis of polymers with complex architectures, the construction of functional nanostructures, and the development of stimuli-responsive soft materials. He received his PhD from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2013 for his work on the synthesis and self-assembly of cyclic polymers with Professor Yasuyuki Tezuka. Following his PhD, he spent two years at the Tokyo University of Science as Specially Appointed Assistant Professor. He joined the University of Tokyo faculty as Assistant Professor in 2015 and was named an Excellent Young Researcher in 2018. During his current position (2018-2019), he engaged in ring opening polymerization of unusual cyclic molecules with organic catalysts with Professor Robert M. Waymouth at Stanford University as a Visiting Scholar. He is the recipient of the Young Scientists’ Prize, Commendation for Science and Technology by Japan Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, 2020.
Lab webpage
Read our interview with Satoshi for Nature Japan (jp version; en version).
Ga-Lai Law, PhD, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2192-6887
Ga-Lai Law is a Full Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University at the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology. She read Chemistry at The University of Manchester where she obtained her MChem, before moving across to Asia to The University of Hong Kong for a DPhil. Following, she pursued her interests in the f elements by joining David Parker’s group in Durham, and later Kenneth N Raymond at UC Berkeley, California. She then started her independent career at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where she has established her research group. Currently her research focuses on interdisciplinary research with the f-elements. Some key areas are on lanthanide supramolecular compounds/complexes in developing molecular edifices for photoluminescence and bio-applications especially in the area of diagnostics, molecular imaging and chiroptical properties
Lab webpage
Teodoro Laino, PhD, IBM Research, Switzerland
Dr Teodoro Laino received his Masters degree in theoretical chemistry in 2001 (University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy) and a doctorate in computational chemistry in 2006 (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy) defending a thesis on 'Multi-Grid QM/ MM Approaches in ab initio Molecular Dynamics'. From 2006 to 2008, Teo worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, contributing to the development of the CP2K simulation package. In 2008, Teo joined the IBM Research - Zurich Laboratory (ZRL) as Research Scientist. He is currently Distinguished Research Scientist and manager.
Personal webpage
Chris Y. Li, PhD, University of Buffalo, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9559-7051
Prof. Chris Li is currently an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Chris worked as an R&D engineer in chemical industries for three years before starting his Ph.D. in Chemistry (2013 - 2018) at Pennsylvania State with Prof. Tom Mallouk. From 2018 – 2020, Chris joined Prof. Ted Sargent’s group as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Toronto. At the University at Buffalo, SUNY, Chris’ research group focus on developing electroanalytical techniques to study chemical mechanisms in electrocatalysis reactions, and reactor design for energy storage and environmental applications.
Personal webpage
Jun Lu, PhD, Zhejiang University, China
Prof. Jun Lu is a chair professor at Zhejiang University and the Dean of Quzhou Power Battery and Energy Storage Research Institute. His research focuses on electrochemical energy storage and conversion technology, with the main focus on beyond Li-ion battery technology. He earned his Bachelors degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2000. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Metallurgical Engineering at the University of Utah (USA) in 2009 with research directed towards metal hydrides for reversible hydrogen storage applications. He received many awards in the field of electrochemical energy storage and conversion throughout his career including IBA Research Award (2022), ECS Battery Division Technology Award (2022); Research Excellence Award in Electrochemical Energy Storage (EES Award), ACS ENFL Division (2022); IBA Early Career Award (2020); R&D 100 Award (2019), and Emerging Researcher Award of ACS ENFL (2019).
Michael Meanwell, PhD, University of Alberta, Canada
Dr Meanwell is the Manley and Marian Johnston Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta in Canada. His research is currently focused in three distinct areas: 1) leveraging electrocatalysis for the discovery of new chemical reactions, 2) invention of new processes for nucleoside analogue synthesis, and 3) total synthesis of bioactive natural products. He previously completed his PhD in 2020 at Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Professor Robert Britton where he worked on C-H functionalization and de novo glycoside synthesis. Dr Meanwell then continued his training as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratories of Professor Phil Baran at the Scripps Research Institute working on electrocatalysis and natural product synthesis. In 2022, he began his independent career at the University of Alberta.
Lab webpage
David Nelson, PhD, University of Strathclyde, UK
Dr Nelson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde (UK). His research group study the mechanisms and structure/reactivity relationships of a range of reactions that are deployed in synthetic organic chemistry, most of which are catalysed by well-defined transition metal complexes. Current areas of focus include nickel-catalysed cross-coupling reactions and C-H functionalisation reactions. He obtained his PhD from the University of Strathclyde in 2012 for a thesis on structure/reactivity relationships in ring-closing metathesis (with Professor J. M. Percy) before carrying out postdoctoral research at the University of St Andrews (with Professor S. P. Nolan). He started his academic position at Strathclyde in 2014 as one of the inaugural cohort of 'Chancellor's Fellows' and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in late 2018. He was a Thieme Chemistry Journals Awardee in 2020.
Lab webpage
Kristyna Pluhackova, PhD, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Dr. Pluhackova is a researcher at the Cluster of Excellence and Stuttgart Center for Simulation Science at the University of Stuttgart (Germany) where her group applies and improves multiscaling molecular dynamics simulation techniques to various systems ranging from small molecules over materials to complex biological systems. Among others, her group currently develops an artificial-intelligence aided methodology for reverse transformation of coarse-grained systems back to atomistic resolution, improves parameters for protein phosphorylation, and establishes a coarse-grained model for simulations of metal-organic frameworks and amorphous carbon materials. During her studies of physical chemistry at the Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), Kristyna Pluhackova has worked on quantum-chemical problems at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Afterwards she obtained her PhD from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany) for development and application of methods for multiscaling molecular dynamic simulations of biomembranes. During her PostDoc at the ETH Zürich in Basel (Switzerland) she complemented atomic force microscopy experiments performed in the Biophysics group of Prof. Daniel Müller unravelling the molecular details of biological processes.
Lab webpage
Fredrik Schaufelberger, PhD, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5298-4310
Fredrik Schaufelberger is an assistant professor of synthetic chemistry at the University of Warwick and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where he researches the use of mechanically interlocked molecules and materials in biology. He obtained his undergraduate degree from at KTH and ETH Zürich (2007-2012), followed by PhD studies at KTH in the area of supramolecular and dynamic covalent chemistry (with Olof Ramström). Following his dissertation, he moved to the group of David A. Leigh at the University of Manchester with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2017-2020). In Manchester, he was studying functional molecular knots and chemically fuelled molecular assemblies such as rotaxanes. After a research stay with Molly M. Stevens at Imperial College London (2020-2021), where he was working on biosensing and drug delivery, he took up a group leader position at KTH before relocating to Warwick in 2024. Fredrik is passionate about synthetic and supramolecular chemistry, biointeractions, soft materials and systems chemistry.
Lab webpage.
Alina Sekretareva, PhD, Uppsala University, Sweden
Dr Alina Sekretareva is an Assistant Professor and Docent in the Department of Chemistry-Ångström at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research group focuses on understanding and controlling electron transfer processes in catalysis, encompassing a wide range of systems—from biological electron transfer in enzymes to photoelectrocatalytic processes on plasmonic nanostructures. The particular emphasis of the group is on the development of single-entity electrochemical methods for studying electron transfer processes at the single molecule/particle level. Dr Sekretareva earned her Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Linköping University, Sweden, working under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Turner and Prof. Mats Eriksson. With a prestigious Wallenberg Postdoctoral Fellowship, she subsequently joined Prof Edward Solomon's world-famous lab in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University in the United States. Dr. Sekretareva is a recipient of the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf's 50th-anniversary Foundation and the Göran Gustafsson Prize in Technical Physics.
Lab webpage
Marina Šekutor, Phd, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
orcid.org/0000-0003-1629-3672
Dr. Marina Šekutor is currently Senior Research Associate at the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia. She received her B.Sc.Eng. degree in 2008 and Ph.D. (under mentorship of Prof. Kata Majerski) in 2013, both from the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb. After completing a Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship in the group of Prof. Peter R. Schreiner (Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany, 2015-2017) and upon returning to Zagreb she continued to pursue her interests in the chemistry of diamondoids. Dr. Šekutor received the Annual award to young scientists and artists in 2014, the Annual award of the Ruđer Bošković Institute in 2017, and the Award for organic chemistry "Vladimir Prelog" in 2019 (awarded by the Croatian Chemical Society). She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb and the Faculty of Medicine, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, and also currently holds the position of Secretary of the Croatian Chemical Society (from 2021). Her research interests include preparation of diamondoid derivatives and other polycyclic cage compounds, their supramolecular host-guest chemistry, characterization and computational analysis of cluster assemblies in helium nanodroplets driven by intermolecular interactions, and use of functionalized diamondoids in materials science.
Lab webpage.
Ulyana Shimanovich, PhD, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Dr Ulyana Shimanovich studied chemistry at the Bar-Ilan University where she obtained her PhD. In 2012 she was elected to a Fulbright fellowship as well as to a Women in Science fellowship, and she conducted her postdoctoral training at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge UK. In 2016 Ulyana joined the Department of Molecular Chemistry and Materials Science, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) as a Senior Scientist (equivalent to Assistant Professor). She has published over 60 papers, and has an h-index of 25. She is the recipient of multiple national and international prizes, including the “Alon” Fellowship for Outstanding Young Researchers, Israeli Council of Higher Education (Israel) and the FEBS Scientific Excellence Award (Europe).
Lab webpage
Richa Singhal, PhD, BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India
Dr. Richa Singhal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at BITS Pilani, K. K. Birla Goa Campus, India. She earned her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Drexel University (USA) in 2016, following an M. Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi and a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from Aligarh Muslim University (2008). Dr. Singhal's postdoctoral research at George Washington University (USA) focused on carbon dioxide capture and its conversion into carbon nanotubes. Before pursuing her doctorate, she served as a Scientist in the Biofuels Division at CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun. Her current research focuses on the synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials for applications in electrochemical energy storage and conversion devices, electrocatalysis, and renewable and sustainable energy technologies. In 2018, she received the Early Career Research award from Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB-DST), India. Lab webpage
Per-Olof Syren, PhD, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4066-2776
Dr Syrén is currently an Associate Professor in Chemistry for Life Sciences at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. After spending 1 year at UC Berkeley (group of Prof. Jack F Kirsch) during his MSc studies, Dr Syrén performed his MSc thesis project in industry at AstraZeneca. He earned his Ph.D. in biotechnology from KTH in 2011 (supervisor Prof. Karl Hult). Following a postdoc in the laboratory of Prof. Bernhard Hauer in Stuttgart as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, Dr. Syrén returned to Sweden and KTH to start his independent scientific career. His research program bridges biotechnology and protein engineering with chemistry and material science for applications in green chemistry. In 2019, he was awarded the competence development award from his Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and the Gunnar Sundblad Research Foundation for his pioneering work on polymer retrobiosynthesis as a tool to access monomers from biomass by biocatalysis.
Lab webpage.
James Walsh, University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3454-3428
James Walsh is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he leads a research group exploring solid-state synthesis and materials characterisation under extreme pressures. He specialises in experimental static and dynamic compression methods coupled to in situ techniques that include: X-ray and neutron diffraction; optical spectroscopies such as Raman, infrared, and UV-vis; and high-energy spectroscopies such as Mössbauer and X-ray absorption. He also works with data-driven methods to expand in silico predictive capabilities for high-pressure phases. James received both his master’s (2010) and his PhD (2014) from the University of Manchester, where he worked with David Collison on the study of exchange interactions in polymetallic molecular nanomagnets using electron paramagnetic resonance, inelastic neutron scattering, and magnetometry. Following his PhD, he carried out post-doctoral research at Northwestern working with Danna Freedman on the use of high-pressure synthesis methods to discover new transition metal–bismuth binary compounds. He has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts since 2019.
Lab webpage.
Andy Wilson, PhD, University of Birmingham, UK
Prof Andy Wilson received a BSc (Hons) 1st class at The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and then undertook his PhD in synthetic chemistry with Professor David A. Leigh FRS on Interlocked Architectures, firstly at UMIST then at The University of Warwick. He then carried out post-doctoral research at Yale University (USA) with Professor Andrew D. Hamilton FRS on the topic of protein surface recognition, followed by further postdoctoral research with Professors E. W. (Bert) Meijer and Rint P. Sijbesma at Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) on the topic of supramolecular polymers. In 2004 he took up his first independent academic position as a Research Lecturer at The University of Leeds, where he was promoted to Professor of Organic Chemistry in 2012 and served as Deputy Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology (2012-2018). Andy moved to the University of Birmingham as Professor of Organic Chemistry in 2023. Andy’s research interests focus on understanding and modulating protein-protein interactions, studies of peptide and protein (mis)assembly, methods for structural and chemical proteomics, fundamental supramolecular chemistry and self-assembled materials. Andy’s research was recognized through the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Bob Hay Lectureship (2012) and the RSC Norman Heatley Award (2016).
Group Webpage
Kristin Wustholz, PhD, William & Mary, USA
Dr Kristin Wustholz is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at William & Mary (USA), where her research group focuses on using spectroscopy to probe the optical and structural properties of chromophores in environments that are inherently complex. She received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Washington in 2007, for her work examining molecular alignment and photophysics in dyed salt crystals. Her research as a postdoctoral fellow with Richard P. Van Duyne at Northwestern University focused on elucidating structure-property relationships in plasmonic materials using single-molecule and single-nanoparticle surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). In 2009 she was awarded the American Chemical Society Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research. Kristin joined the chemistry department at William & Mary in 2010, where her current research involves understanding the interfacial interactions and electron transfer properties of chromophores at semiconductor and metal interfaces for applications to solar energy conversion, super-resolution imaging, and art conservation. In 2016 she was awarded the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.
Lab webpage
Wei Zhang, PhD, Jilin University, China
Dr Zhang is currently a full Professor (TANG Auchin Scholar-Leading Professor since 2020) and the director of the Electron Microscopy Center at Jilin University (China). He earned his PhD from the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2004, for his work on clarification of microstructural evolution and mechanism of conventional materials under electropulsing. Then he held academic positions at the National Institute for Materials Science (Japan), Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (South Korea), Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (Germany), Technical University of Denmark, and CIC Energigune (Spain). In 2016, Dr Zhang was awarded Ikerbasque Research Professor. He discovered the battery-mimic mechanism and diffusionless phase transition-like conversion reaction promoted bulk-utilization in pseudocapacitance, and proposed a thin-film theory-based strategy of suppressing lithium dendrites via tuning surface energy. He was elected as deputy president for the Electron Microscopy Society of Jilin Province. His current research focuses on surface and interface chemistry of advanced materials toward applications in electrochemical energy storage and conversion, electrocatalysis, and heterogeneous catalysis.
Lab webpage
Jing Zhao, PhD, University of Connecticut, USA
orcid.org/ 0000-0002-6882-2196
Dr. Jing Zhao is a Professor in the Chemistry Department at University of Connecticut. Dr. Zhao received her BS degree in Chemical Physics from University of Science and Technology of China in 2003. She received her PhD in chemistry from Northwestern University in 2008 under the supervision of Profs. George Schatz and Richard Van Duyne (deceased) studying plasmon-molecular resonance interaction. After that, she joined the laboratory of Prof. Moungi Bawendi (2023 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as postdoc working on fluorescence spectroscopy of single quantum dots. She became an assistant professor at UConn Chemistry in 2012 and is currently a tenured professor. She obtained the NSF Career Award in 2016, and was highlighted as emerging investigators by Materials Frontiers Chemistry, Journal of Materials Chemistry C in 2018, and won the Nano Research Young Innovators Award in Nanoenergy in 2019. Her current research interest includes plasmon-exciton interaction, electron and energy transfer from quantum dots to molecular acceptors, synthesis of metal and semiconductor nanoparticles, and their applications in catalysis and biological sensing and imaging.
Lab webpage
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