Excitonic Frontiers - POSTPONED

Felix (Phil) Castellano earned a BA in Chemistry from Clark University in 1991 and a PhD in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. Following an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University in 1998. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004, to Professor in 2006, and was appointed Director of the Center for Photochemical Sciences in 2011. In 2013, he moved his research program to North Carolina State University where he is currently the Goodnight Innovation Distinguished Chair. He was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2015 and earned the I-APS Award in Photochemistry in 2019. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Physics Reviews. His current research focuses on metal-organic chromophore photophysics and energy transfer, photochemical upconversion phenomena, solar fuels photocatalysis, energy transduction at semiconductor/molecular interfaces, photoredox catalysis, and excited state electron transfer processes.

Andy led the bid to establish the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) via the UK Research Partnerships Infrastructure Fund and he is its first Academic Director. He is also the Director of the £10 M Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design. His main research interests are organic materials, supramolecular chemistry, and materials for energy production and molecular separation. This is underpinned by a strong technical interest in high-throughput methods and robotics.

Andy was elected to the Royal Society in 2015.  He has been awarded the Macro Group Young Researchers Award (2002), the RSC Award in Environmentally Friendly Polymers (2005), the McBain Medal (2007), the Corday-Morgan Prize (2009), the Macro Group Award (2010), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the Tilden Prize (2014), the American Chemical Society Doolittle Award (2014) and the Hughes Medal (2019).  He was also the 2015 MIT-Georgia Pacific Lecturer in Organic Chemistry. In both 2011 and 2014, Andy was named in a Thomson Reuters list as one of the Top 100 materials scientists of the last decade. He was also named in the more recent 2017 Clarivate Highly Cited list in the field of chemistry. He was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigators grant in 2012 (RobOT). In 2015, he was appointed as a Consultant Professor in Hauzhong University of Science & Technology, China. He was also appointed as an Honorary Professor at East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, in 2017. 

Benedetta Mennucci is Professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Pisa in Italy. During the last ten years, she acted as President of the PhD School in Chemical and Material Sciences of the University of Pisa and President of the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society. Starting from 2014 she has been Senior Editor for the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters of the American Chemical Society. She is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS) and of the Board of The World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists (WATOC). Her research mainly lies in the development and the application of hybrid QM/classical models to describe light-driven processes in supramolecular systems of increasing complexity such as excitation energy transfers in natural and artificial light-harvesting complexes, for which in 2011 she obtained an ERC Starting Grant. More recently, a part of her research has moved on the simulation of photoresponsive proteins, for which, in 2018, she obtained an ERC Advanced Grant with a project entitled “LIFETimeS: Light-Induced Function: from Excitation to Signal through Time and Space”.

Biography not yet available

Emily Weiss is the Mark and Nancy Ratner Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, by courtesy, and the founding Director of the Photo-Sciences Research Center at Northwestern University. Emily earned her PhD from Northwestern in 2005, advised by Mark Ratner and Michael Wasielewski. Her graduate work focused on magnetic superexchange interactions of radical ion pairs created by electron transfer within organic donor-acceptor systems. Emily did postdoctoral research at Harvard University under George M Whitesides from 2005 – 2008 and started her independent career at Northwestern in Fall 2008. The objectives of Emily’s research group are to understand the mechanisms of conversion of energy from one class to another at interfaces and the behaviour of quantum confined systems far from equilibrium, and to design and synthesise nanostructures that are new combinations of organic and inorganic components, with applications in photocatalysis, quantum information, and biological imaging. 

Bill Rutherford uses physico-chemical methods to understand photosynthesis. He has particular interests in the bioenergetics and evolution of photosynthetic electron transfer and water oxidation. Having studied biochemistry at the University of Liverpool, his PhD at UCL involved biophysics of bacterial photosynthesis. As a post doc at the University of Illinois, he moved into oxygenic photosynthesis, discovering the excited triplet state of chlorophyll formed by radical-pair recombination. This state causes photo-oxidative stress that can limit plant growth, bleach coral, etc. As a post doc in Riken, Japan, he determined the origin of thermoluminescence in oxygenic photosynthesis, establishing it as research method. His work was central in establishing the common evolutionary origins of all the photosynthetic reaction centres. He was a CNRS researcher in Saclay, near Paris, before moving to Imperial College London in 2011, where he holds the Chair of Biochemistry of Solar Energy.

Chris Kay studied chemistry at the University of Oxford, where he was also awarded his DPhil. Subsequently he moved to the Free University Berlin for postdoctoral work using electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy to study stable and transient paramagnetic species. He moved to University College London as Senior Lecturer in 2006. A joint position between the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology allowed him to pursue his interests in magnetic materials and structural biology, and in 2014 he was promoted to Professor of EPR Spectrometer. In 2017 he was appointed Professor of Physical Chemistry and Didactics of Chemistry at the University of Saarland.

Distinguished professor, Kyushu University. Director of Kyushu University’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research (OPERA) and of the Fukuoka i3 center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research. Obtained his doctorate in Materials Science and Technology in 1991 from Kyushu University and held positions as at the Chemical Products R&D Center at Ricoh Co., the Department of Functional Polymer Science at Shinshu University, the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, and Chitose Institute of Science and Technology before returning to Kyushu University as a professor. He co-founded and serves as scientific advisor for Kyulux Inc and KOALA Tech Inc. He was recently awarded Thomson Reuters Research Front Award (2016), Nishina Memorial Prize (2017), Highly Cited Researcher for the Cross-Field category (2018 and 2019).

Corine Mathonière, born in 1968 in Montluçon (France), received her education in Chemistry at the University of Paris Pierre and Marie Curie, France. Her PhD work was devoted to the optical properties of molecular-based magnetic materials under the supervision of Professor O Kahn in 1993. After a post-doctoral stay in the group of Professor P Day (Royal Institution of Great Britain, London), she joined the University of Bordeaux as associate professor in 1994, then was promoted to professor in 2010. Since 1994, Dr Corine Mathonière has developed at the The Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry of Bordeaux (CNRS) research activities in “Switchable Molecules and Materials molecular” group interested in the synthesis and physical studies of switchable molecular materials. In this research field, she has published 145 articles with more than 6000 citations and has an h index of 44 (February 2020).

Yasuhiro Kobori has been a Professor of Chemistry at the Molecular Photoscience Research Center in Kobe University since 2017. He received his Doctor of Science in Chemistry in 1998 under the supervision of Professor Kinichi Obi from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Before joining Kobe University in 2013, he was employed at Tohoku University from 1996 to 2002 (supervised by Professor Shozo Tero-Kubota), at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2006 (supervised by James R Norris, Jr), and at Shizuoka University from 2006 to 2013. In 2013, he moved to the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science in Kobe University as a full professor. His research interests include mechanisms of charge and exciton generations in photosynthetic proteins, organic photovoltaic systems, and molecular wires for development of the efficient light–energy conversion systems.

Akshay holds the Harding Lectureship in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His research interests include the electronic and optical properties and device physics of molecular semiconductors, quantum dots and 2D semiconductors (www.rao.oe.phy.cam.ac.uk). His group uses ultrafast spectroscopy and ultrafast microscopy to understand how excitonic dynamics are controlled by spin, wavefunction delocalisation, exciton-phonon coupling and defects in semiconductors. His group has pioneered the study of singlet exciton fission and triplet exciton transfer between molecular semiconductors and quantum dots, an area which has the potential to overcome the Shockley-Queisser limit. Akshay was awarded of the 2017 Henry Moseley Medal of the Institute of Physics for outstanding early career contributions to experimental physics. He is cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cambridge Photo Technology.

Dr Libai Huang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University and a senior editor for the Journal of Physical Chemistry. She received her BS from Peking University in 2001 and her PhD from University of Rochester in 2006.  Her research programme focuses on imaging exciton and charge transport in the equilibrium and nonequilibrium regimes with femtosecond time resolution and nanometre spatial resolution.

Greg Scholes is the William S. Tod Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University and Director of the Energy Frontier Research Center BioLEC (Bio-inspired Light-Escalated Chemistry). Originally from Melbourne, Australia, he later undertook postdoctoral training at Imperial College London and University of California Berkeley. He started his independent career at the University of Toronto (2000 - 2014) where he was the D.J. LeRoy Distinguished Professor Dr Scholes is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters,  Interim Director the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research programme Bioinspired Solar Energy, Adjunct Professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Dr Scholes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2019 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009.