Contributors to the Materials Chemistry Frontiers Emerging Investigator Series 2024

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Abstract

The Materials Chemistry Frontiers Emerging Investigators Series highlights the best research being conducted by scientists in the early stages of their independent careers. This editorial features the emerging investigators who contributed to this series in 2024. Each contributor was recommended as carrying out work with the potential to influence future directions in materials chemistry. Congratulations to all the researchers, we hope you enjoy reading their work.

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Haipeng Lu is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). His group works on developing inorganic chemistry approaches to address challenges related to renewable energy and sustainability. He received his BSc in chemistry from Nanjing University in 2012, and completed his PhD in 2017 in chemistry at the University of Southern California. He then moved to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as a postdoctoral fellow.

EMI article: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3QM00727H

Website: https://lightchargespin-dev.hkust.edu.hk/

Adam Kubas is the leader of the Cooperative Catalysis (CoopCat) group at the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland (IChF). The group was established in 2019, three years after Adam joined IChF. He obtained his PhD in 2012 from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Karin Fink, working on applications of high-level quantum chemical methods in homogeneous catalysis. At that time, he became increasingly interested in the development and application of wave-function-based methods to other types of catalysis, such as enzymatic catalysis when working on hydrogenases with Prof. Jochen Blumberger at the University College London (UK) or heterogeneous catalysis when working on oxides with Prof. Frank Neese and Dr Dimitrios Manganas at Max-Planck-Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (Germany). The CoopCat group aims to unify these experiences and to develop a robust theoretical framework to describe catalysis, irrespective of catalyst/substrate phases. Moreover, the group explores cooperativity in various dimensions, including theory–experiment synergy and interdisciplinary approaches.

EMI article: https://doi.org/10.1039/D4QM00766B

Website: https://coopcat.pl/

Yang Wang obtained his master’s degree from Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Ziyi Ge in 2013. He then moved to Tokyo Institute of Technology and earned his PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. T. Michinobu in 2017. After finishing the JSPS postdoctoral research under the guidance of Prof. K. Takimiya (RIKEN, Japan), he joined Prof. Yunqi Liu’s group at Fudan University as an associate professor. His research is focusing on the design and synthesis of organic/polymer semiconductors for organic thin-film transistors, all-polymer solar cells, organic thermoelectric devices and some other optoelectronic and bioelectronics applications.

EMI article: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3QM01189E

Website: https://mmd.fudan.edu.cn/wy/list.htm

Michael Ross is an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research interests focus on understanding the unique optical, chemical, and catalytic properties of metallic nanomaterials, and leveraging those properties to address challenges in energy, environmental detection, and photonics. Before that, he was awarded a CIFAR Bio-Inspired Solar Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship to study with Peidong Yang at the University of California, Berkeley. Michael earned his BS in biochemistry at Providence College and PhD in chemistry at Northwestern University as a National Defense Science and Engineering (NDSEG) Fellow. At Northwestern, under the guidance of Chad Mirkin and George Schatz, he focused on the design of optical properties in nanoparticle systems whose structure was programmed by DNA. He has been recognized as a Scialog Negative Emissions Fellow, and the Winner of the NASA Centennial CO₂ Conversion Challenge. He has also received campus-wide awards for mentoring undergraduate researchers and for sustainability.

EMI article: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3QM00978E

Website: https://sites.uml.edu/michael-ross/

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