Javier Aizpurua, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Javier Aizpurua is a Research Professor of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) at the Center for Materials Physics in San Sebastián, Spain, where he leads the “Theory of Nanophotonics Group” (http//cfm.ehu.eus/nanophotonics). Aizpurua has developed theory to understand the interaction of light and nanostructured materials in a variety of field-enhanced spectroscopy and microscopy configurations, such as in SERS, SEIRA, s-SNOM, STM, or STEM. The understanding of the optical response of complex nanosystems has been the main focus of his research, particularly in the field of optical nanoantennas and nanoplasmonics, with special emphasis on the role of quantum effects in nanophotonics.
Aleksei Aksimentiev, University of Illinois, USA
Aleksei Aksimentiev received his Master’s degree in physics from the Ivan Franko Lviv State University, Lviv, Ukraine, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Warsaw, Poland. After a brief postdoctoral training at Mitsui Chemicals, Japan, he joined the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, Urbana, IL, as a postdoctoral research associate. In 2005, he became a faculty member of the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, where he is currently Blue Waters Professor of physics. His research interests include nanopore systems for single molecule detection and manipulation, self-assembled DNA nanostructures, and molecular mechanisms of epigenetic regulation.
Toshio Ando, Kanazawa University, Japan
Toshio Ando is a Biophysicist who has specialized in the development and use of measurement techniques for understanding the functional mechanism of proteins. In the last two decades he has been developing high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) techniques to directly visualize protein molecules in action at high spatiotemporal resolution. HS-AFM is now highly advanced for practical use. The exquisite dynamic images filmed in recent studies by his group have been continuously demonstrating that this new microscopy is a powerful tool capable of revealing the dynamic process and structure dynamics of biological molecules in stunning detail.
Amanda Barnard, CSIRO Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory, Australia
Dr. Amanda Barnard is an Office of the Chief Executive (OCE) Science Leader, and Head of the Molecular & Materials Modelling within Data61 at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO); joining as an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in 2009. She received her Ph.D. (Applied Physics) in from RMIT in 2003, followed by a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory (USA), and the prestigious senior research position as Violette & Samuel Glasstone Fellow at the University of Oxford (UK) with an Extraordinary Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College. Dr Barnard is a member of numerous Boards and national Committees, and regularly Chairs scientific conferences and symposia in Australia, Europe, USA and Asia. In 2016 she was promoted to Senior Associate Editor for Science Advances (AAAS) and continued her term on the Nature Index Panel (Nature Publishing Group). For her work she has won the 2009 Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the 2009 Malcolm McIntosh Award from the Prime Minister of Australia for the Physical Scientist of the Year, the 2010 Frederick White Prize from the Australian Academy of Sciences, the 2014 ACS Nano Lectureship (Asia/Pacific) from the American Chemical Society, and the 2014 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Theory) from the Foresight Institute, being the first woman to do so in the history of the award.
Prof Colette Boskovic, University of Melbourne, Australia
Colette Boskovic obtained her BSc(Hons) and PhD degrees from the University of Melbourne, undertaking her PhD research under the supervision of Tony Wedd. After post-doctoral stints with George Christou at Indiana University and Hans Güdel at the University of Berne, she returned to the University of Melbourne in 2004, where she is now Associate Professor. Colette was awarded the 2013 Alan Sargeson Award from the Inorganic Chemistry Division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and the 2014 University of Melbourne Dean of Science’s Award for Excellence in Research. Her research interests lie in the fields of molecular magnetism, polyoxometalate chemistry and redox-active switchable molecular materials.
Anthony Burrell, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA
Anthony K. Burrell received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1990 from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Chair of Synthetic Chemistry in 1998-2001 Massey University, New Zealand. Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory 2001-2010 where he established new programs in materials chemistry including being one of the leads for the Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center of Excellence. In 2011 he moved to Argonne National Laboratory where he was the Head of Department for the CSE Electrochemical Energy Storage Department and a PI in the Joint Center for Energy storage Research (JCESR) and the Voltage Fade Project. In addition he was the PI for the High Energy-High Voltage Deep Dive and the Intermetallic Anodes Consortium. In 2016 he joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as Chief Technologist for Energy Storage. He currently leads several multi-institutional research projects for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, DOE.
Prof Rachel Caruso, University of Melbourne, Australia
Rachel Caruso holds a joint appointment in the School of Chemistry, the University of Melbourne, Australia and in Manufacturing at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Her research group has focused on the controlled synthesis of porous inorganic materials with potential application in areas including energy conversion, energy storage, and water remediation through photocatalytic degradation and heavy metal ion removal.
Karen Cheung, The University of British Columbia, Canada
Karen C. Cheung received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. From 2002 to 2005, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. She is now at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests include lab-on-a-chip systems for cell culture and characterization, inkjet printing for tissue engineering, and implantable neural interfaces.
Eugenio Coronado, University of Valencia, Spain
Eugenio Coronado is Director of the Institute for Molecular Science (ICMol) at the University of Valencia and of the European Institute of Molecular Magnetism. His research career has been devoted to the chemistry and physics of multifunctional and stimuli-responsive magnetic molecular materials, and new molecular nanomagnets. More recently his research interest has shifted towards Molecular Nanoscience, specially to the use of these kinds of materials and magnetic molecules in Molecular Spintronics and Quantum Computing. To develop these topics he received from the European Commission an ERC Advanced Grant in 2009, and is currently coordinating a COST Action on Molecular Spintronics.
Steven De Feyter, KU Leuven, Belgium
Steven De Feyter is full professor at KU Leuven, in Belgium. Research interests include nanochemistry and supramolecular chemistry on surfaces. Self-assembly is a central theme of his research, with a focus on the relation between structure and function. Research activities cover a broad range of topics such as two-dimensional crystal engineering, surface chirality, templating, dynamics and reactivity, and the functionalization of carbon based 2D materials. He is associate editor of the RSC journal Chemical Communications. Part of his researched is financed by an ERC Advanced Grant.
William Dichtel, Cornell University, USA
Will was born in Houston, Texas, but spent most of his impressionable years growing up in Roanoke, Virginia. Roanoke is located in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains and features the world’s second largest man-made star, lit up every night for your viewing pleasure.
He was an undergraduate student at MIT, where he majored in chemistry and was fortunate to gain his first research experience working in the laboratory of Prof. Tim Swager. Will then moved to UC-Berkeley for graduate school, where he earned his Ph.D. for investigating light harvesting macromolecules under the supervision of Prof. Jean M. J. Fréchet. He next moved to Los Angeles for a joint postdoctoral appointment with Prof. Fraser Stoddart, then at UCLA, and Prof. Jim Heath at Caltech. There his research focused on developing efficient strategies for the synthesis of mechanically interlocked compounds and incorporating these molecules onto surfaces and into solid-state devices. Prof. Dichtel began his independent career in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University in 2008 and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2014. He moved to Nortwestern University in the summer of 2016 as the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry.
Albert Folch, University of Washington, USA
Albert Folch received his BSc in physics from the University of Barcelona (UB), Spain, in 1989. In 1994, he received his PhD in surface science and nanotechnology from the UB’s Physics Dept. During his PhD he was a visiting scientist from 1990–91at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab working on AFM under Dr. Miquel Salmeron. From 1994–1996, he was a postdoc at MIT developing MEMS under the advice of Martin Schmidt (EECS) and Mark Wrighton (Chemistry). In 1997, he joined the laboratory of Mehmet Toner as a postdoc at Harvard’s Center for Engineering in Medicine to apply soft lithographic methods to tissue engineering. He has been at Seattle’s UW BioE since June 2000 where he is an Associate Professor. His lab works at the interface between microfluidics, neurobiology and cancer. In 2001 he received a NSF Career Award and in 2014 he was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows (Class of 2015). He serves on the Advisory Board of Lab on a Chip since 2006. Albert Folch is the author of four books, including “Introduction to BioMEMS”, a textbook now adopted by more than 68 departments in 14 countries (including 40 universities in the U.S. alone). Since 2007, the lab runs a celebrated outreach art program called BAIT (Bringing Art Into Technology) which has produced six exhibits, a popular resource gallery of >2,000 free images related to microfluidics and microfabrication, and a YouTube channel that plays microfluidic videos with music which accumulates ~120,000 visits since 2009.
Dave Garrett, University of Melbourne, Australia
Dr David J. Garrett is a Post-Doctoral Fellow based in the Department of Physics at the University of Melbourne. He received his PhD from the University Of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2011. He has worked as an Intern at IBM Almaden, California, and as part of the Bionic Vision Australia materials team tasked with building a diamond retinal implant to restore sight to patients with retinitis pigmentosa. David now has a research group, based in Melbourne and works primarily on diamond materials for retinal implants, investigation and integration of various carbon materials for biomedical applications with specific focus on neuro-modulation devices.
Mike George, Nottingham University, England
Silvia Giordani, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy
Silvia Giordani received a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Miami, USA. Supported by Marie Curie Fellowships she studied various aspects of nanotechnology as a post-doctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland and the University of Trieste, Italy. She has been awarded the prestigious SFI President of Ireland Young Researcher Award and from 2007 to 2013 she was a Research Assistant Professor at TCD. She received a 2012 L’Oreal-UNESCO UK and Ireland for Women in Science Fellowship. Since 2013 she is the founder director of the Nano Carbon Materials Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova.
David Harris, Northwestern University, USA
T. David Harris obtained his Ph.D. with Prof. Jeffrey R. Long at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focused on the synthesis of single-molecule and single-chain magnets. Dave then carried out postdoctoral research with Prof. Theodore A. Betley at Harvard University. There, his work centered on the synthesis of multinuclear clusters with unusual electronic structures for small-molecule activation. Dave assumed his current position of Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University in July 2012, where his research group employs coordination chemistry to manipulate electronic spin in molecules and materials such as MRI probes and metal-organic magnets.
Richard Kaner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Richard B. Kaner received a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 working with Prof. Alan MacDiarmid (Nobel Laureate 2000). After carrying out postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1987 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1991, became a Full Professor in 1993 and a Distinguished Professor in 2012. He has published over 325 papers in top peer reviewed journals and holds 23 U.S. patents with 25 more pending. According to the 2014 and 2015 Thomson-Reuters rankings, he is among the world’s most highly cited authors. Professor Kaner has received awards from the Dreyfus, Fulbright, Guggenheim and Sloan Foundations along with the Materials Research Society Medal, and the Exxon Fellowship in Solid State Chemistry, the Buck-Whitney Research Award, the Tolman Medal and the Award in the Chemistry of Materials from the American Chemical Society for his work on refractory materials including new synthetic routes to ceramics, intercalation compounds, superhard metals, graphene and conducting polymers. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Materials Research Society (MRS) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). Along with appointments in the Departments of Chemistry and Materials Science & Engineering, Professor Kaner served as the Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute from 2007-09. Professor Kaner’s teaching has been recognized with the Hanson-Dow Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Harriet and Charles Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award and the Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence.
Cameron Kepert, The University of Sydney, Australia
Cameron Kepert obtained his B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of Western Australia, his PhD from the Royal Institution of Great Britain/University of London, was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 1995-1999, and is now a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney. He is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, the Le Fèvre Memorial Prize of the Australian Academy of Science, the Burrows Award and Rennie Medal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, and Federation and Future Fellowships from the Australian Research Council. His research interests include nanoporous metal-organic framework materials, spin-crossover, molecular magnets, molecular conductors, and negative thermal expansion materials.
Heiner Linke, Lund University, Sweden
Heiner Linke is a Professor of Nanophysics at Lund University in Sweden. Between 1998 – 2001 he was a research fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney/Australia, before joining the physics department at the University of Oregon in 2001 where he received indefinite tenure in 2005 and remained until 2009. Since 2013, he is the Director of the Center for Nanoscience at Lund University (NanoLund), an interdisciplinary research environment engaging about 270 scientists in three faculties. His research interests focus on energy conversion at the nanoscale, including molecular motors and thermoelectrics. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (physics class) in 2014.
Jenny Malmstrom, University of Auckland / The MacDiarmid Institute, NZ
Jenny Malmström joined the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering in 2016. She received her MSc degree in Bioengineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden (2004) and a Ph.D. in Nanoscience at the University of Aarhus, Denmark (2010). From Denmark she moved to Auckland, where she joined the School of Chemical Sciences (UoA) as a post-doctoral research fellow. Her research is very interdisciplinary and focusses on the interface where biological molecules or cells meet novel materials. Her expertise lies in characterising and understanding the material-biomolecule interactions and the influence of surface properties that underpin cell adhesion onto substrates. This detailed understanding can be applied to emerging and exciting areas such as the creation of smart materials to help understand or control cellular behaviour, or to create ordered functional patterns of biomolecules. Recent work in connection to the functional nanostructures theme has been focussed on using block copolymers to template and order multimeric ring-shaped proteins. These ordered protein stacks can be used to template for example optically or magnetically active entities.
Nathan McClenaghan, University of Bordeaux / CNRS, France
Nathan D. McClenaghan is a director of research in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the University of Bordeaux, France. Since integrating the CNRS in 2003, his research work focuses on the conception and study of photoactive organic and inorganic molecules, supramolecular assemblies and nanomaterials and fast photoinduced processes therein. He is laureat of the CNRS bronze medal for physical chemistry 2008 and recipient of a European young investigator grant (ERC).
Carla Meledandri, University of Otago / The MacDiarmid Institute, NZ
Carla Meledandri is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Otago. She obtained her Chemistry degree from Penn State University in 2001 then worked as a Research Associate at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland, USA. She carried out PhD research from 2004 – 2008 in the School of Chemical Sciences at Dublin City University, Ireland, and was awarded her PhD in 2009. After a brief period of postdoctoral research, she moved to New Zealand where she joined the academic staff at the University of Otago. Her research focusses on the development of functional nanoscale and nanocomposite materials, and evaluation of their efficacy for applications in the area of biomedicine.
Prof. Tomonobu Nakayama, National Institute for Materials Science
Current positions:
1) Administrative Director: International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS).
2) Deputy Director: International Center for Young Scientists (ICYS), NIMS.
3) Group Leader: Nano Functionality Integration Group (Nano-FIG), MANA, NIMS.
4) Professor: Graduate School of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Tsukuba.
Thomas Nann, University of Victoria Wellington / The MacDiarmid Institute, NZ
Thomas Nann is Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, and Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Chemistry at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Thomas’ career began at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he completed his PhD in Electrochemistry in 1997. He then started to work on the synthesis, characterisation and functionalisation of nanomaterials in Freiburg, where he was awarded his habilitation in 2004. In 2006 he accepted an appointment to the Chair of Nanoscience at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, which he held for almost four years. Between 2010 and 2015, Thomas was Professor at the Ian Wark Research Institute at the University of South Australia (UniSA). In 2011 he was awarded one of the prestigious ARC Future Fellowships. During this time, he also held the positions of Associate Director of the Ian Wark Research Institute and Director of the South Australian node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF). In August 2015, Thomas commenced his current role at the MacDiarmid Institute and School of Chemical and Physical Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington.
Prof Min Qiu, Zhejiang University, China
Prof. Min Qiu received Ph.D. degree in Condensed Matter Physics from Zhejiang University, China in 1999, and a second Ph.D. degree in Electromagnetic Theory from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, in 2001. In 2001 he joined KTH as an Assistant Professor. He became an associate professor in 2005, and a full professor (Professor of Photonics) in 2009. He is now a distinguished professor at Zhejiang University, China. He is the author or co-author of more than 190 international refereed journal papers with an h-index of 42. His research focuses mostly on nanophotonics, including optical metamaterials, photonic crystals, plasmonics, silicon photonics, and integrated optical circuits. Prof. Qiu is a Fellow of IEEE, OSA and SPIE.
Alan Rowan, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, University of
Queensland, Australia
Professor Alan Rowan has performed research at the interface of chemistry and biology with seminal and pioneering work on processive catalysis (Nature 2003), and (Science 2008) and functional self-assembly (Science 2006). His latest scientific achievement has been the development of the first truly biomimetic hydrogel which mimics the mechanic and functional properties of the extracellular membrane. This recent discovery published in (Nature 2013) has established Professor Rowan as an innovative scientist, working toward understanding at the molecular level the functional of hierarchical materials and catalysis.
Alan Rowan studied at the University of Liverpool and obtained his first class honours in chemistry and was awarded the Leverlhulme Medal. He obtained his PhD degree with prof Ray Abraham at the same university working on the self-assembly of chlorophylls. He subsequently worked for two years in New Zealand with prof Chris Hunter in the area of catenane and rotaxane self-assembly. He returned to Europe as a Marie-curie Fellow to work with Prof Roeland Nolte at the University of Nijmegen the Netherlands, where he continued research in functional supramolecular assemblies. He stayed in Nijmegen and became fully professor in 2005, where he has established a new group in molecular materials, studying the relationship between molecular assembly and functional properties. In January 2016 he left the Netherlands and became Director of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia.
Thomas Schimmel, University of Karlsruhe – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Thomas Schimmel is Professor of Physics and Joint Institute Director at the Institute of Applied Physics, KIT South Campus and Head of Department at the Institute of Nanotechnology, KIT North Campus. He is Chair of the Research Network “Functional Nanostructures”, the platform for nanoscience and nanotechnology in Baden-Württemberg with more than 200 researchers. Schimmel is Editor-in-Chief of the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, one of the leading open-access journals in its field. Schimmel got his PhD at the University of Bayreuth and received offers for tenures as Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, the University of Linz and the University of Karlsruhe. For his research, he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Research Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg and the Philip Morris Research Award. His research focus is on nanoscale science, including AFM, nanolithography, self-organization, polymer surfaces and structure formation, bionic surfaces and coatings and quantum electronics and plasmonics at the single-atom level including the Single-Atom Transistor which he developed and demonstrated together with his team.
Rachel Segalman, UC Santa Barbara, USA
Rachel A. Segalman received her B.S. from the University of Texas at Austin and Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Universite Louis Pasteur before joining the faculty of UC Berkeley from 2004-2014. In the summer of 2014, she moved to UC Santa Barbara to be the Kramer Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials and became Department Chair of Chemical Engineering in 2015. Segalman’s group works on controlling the structure and thermodynamics of functional polymers including polymerized ionic liquids and semiconducting a
nd bioinspired polymers. This has led to a host of new and promising applications, particularly in plastic thermoelectrics. Among other awards, Segalman received the 2015 Journal of Polymer Science Innovation Award, the 2012 Dillon Medal from the American Physical Society, the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar.
Prof Roberta Sessoli, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Roberta Sessoli working at the interface between chemistry and physics has been a pioneer in the field of molecular nanomagnetism contributing to the discovery of magnetic bistability at the molecular level, a phenomenon that has revolutionized the field of nanomagnetism. Recently she has moved to the organization of molecules on conducting and magnetic substrates and their investigation through advanced synchrotron techniques. Recent interests include interplay between magnetism and chirality and two spin level molecular systems with long spin coherence time as candidate for quantum logic operations. She is author of more than 300 publications and she has received many awards including the Agilent Technology Europhysics Prize and the IUPAC prize for distinguished women in Chemistry.
Prof Henry J. Snaith, FRS, Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK
Henry Snaith FRS is a professor of physics at Oxford University and is CSO and Founder of Oxford PV Ltd. His research is on developing new materials for photovoltaics and understanding and controlling optoelectronic processes occurring within the devices. He has made a number of significant contributions to the field of photovolatics, with the most notable being the discovery of the remarkable PV properties of metal halide perovskites. He has received a number of awards and accolades including the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award 2014, and named as one of “Nature’s 10” people who mattered in 2013.
Prof Natalie Stingelin, Georgia Institute Of Technology, USA
FRSC is a Full Professor of Organic Energy Materials, with prior positions at Imperial College London; the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge; the Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven; and ETH Zürich. She was an External Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and is Associate Editor of the RSC journal ‘Journal of Materials Chemistry C’. She was awarded the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining’s Rosenhain Medal and Prize (2014) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) President’s International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) Award for Visiting Scientists (2015); she was the Chair of the 2016 Gordon Conference on ‘Electronic Processes in Organic Materials’ as well as the 2016 Zing conference on ‘Organic Semiconductors’. She has published >145 papers and 6 issued patents. Her research interests encompass organic electronics & photonics, bioelectronics, physical chemistry of organic functional materials, and smart inorganic/organic hybrid systems.
Shane Telfer, Massey University/The MacDiarmid Institute, NZ
Shane Telfer was born in the town of Clyde in Central Otago, New Zealand. He completed a BSc(Hons) and a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Canterbury, and is now an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Massey University. This gradual drift northwards was punctuated by a post-doctoral odyssey that included stops in Geneva, Tokyo and Montreal. Shane has broad interests in synthetic chemistry and molecular materials. The current focus of his research is the chemistry of metal-organic frameworks, a tremendously exciting new class of porous materials.
Pall Thordarson, University of New South Wales, Australia
A/Prof. Pall Thordarson (Palli) obtained his BSc. from U. Iceland in 1996 and a PhD in from U. Sydney in 2001. Following a Marie Curie Fellowship in the Netherlands he returned to Australia in 2003 and was then appointed at UNSW in 2007 where he is currently an A/Prof. His research interest range from Nanomedicine and Light-harvesting Materials to and Supramolecular and Systems Chemistry. He has received a number of awards including the 2012 Le Fèvre Memorial Prize from the Australian Academy of Science for outstanding basic research in Chemistry by a Scientist under the age of 40.
Prof Matt Trau, University of Queensland, Australia
Matt Trau is currently a Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. His research is dedicated towards developing innovative nano-diagnostics to help transform the healthcare system towards early detection and personalized treatment of disease, and also to help enable the emerging “Wellness Industry” which aims to dramatically extend high quality human life through a combination of innovative diagnostic technology and preventative measures. Among Matt’s other roles, he is also deputy director and co-founder of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN). Since graduating from the University of Sydney (BSc Hons I, University Medal) and the University of Melbourne (PhD in Physical Chemistry, 1993), he has held positions within industry and academia across the globe. These include a Fulbright Research Fellowship at Princeton University, USA, a research scientist at Dow Chemical and ICI Pty Ltd. Matt has also been a Visiting Professor at two of the largest Cancer Research Centres in the world: The Dana Farber Cancer Research Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston (2000), and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre, Seattle (2008). Matt is internationally recognised for his innovative and cross-disciplinary research at the interface between chemistry, nanotechnology, biology and medicine. He has co-authored more than 160 publications, many of which appear in the highest impact journals in his field, e.g., eight Science and Nature family journal publications overall to date – many of which have been highly cited. Over the past 10 years, he has raised greater than M$25 of competitive research funding to support his work. His major awards and honours include an ARC Federation Fellowship (one of the most prestigious scientific fellowships in Australia), a Fulbright Research Fellowship to the US, a “Young Tall Poppy” Award for Queensland, a UQ Foundation/Vice Chancellor’s Research Excellence Award, a Paul Harris Fellowship, and a Pink Circle Award for breast cancer research excellence. Among other grants, Matt is currently the lead investigator on a 5-year M$5 national collaborative research grant from the National Breast Cancer Foundation (“Enabling Clinical Epigenetic Diagnostics: The Next Generation of Personalized Breast Cancer Care“).
Tatsuya Tsukuda, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Tatsuya Tsukuda received his PhD degree in 1994 from the University of Tokyo. After postdoctoral research at RIKEN, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor of the Department of Basic Sciences at the University of Tokyo in 1994. He was then appointed as an Associate Professor at the Institute for Molecular Science in 2000 and was promoted to Professor at the Catalysis Research Center of Hokkaido University in 2007, before moving to the University of Tokyo in 2011. His research is focused on size-selected synthesis of gold clusters protected by ligands and supported on solid materials, and their catalytic application.
Prof Jaume Veciana, Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, Spain
Prof. Jaume Veciana is Full Professor at the Institut de Ciencia de Materials de Barcelona, ICMAB-CSIC, Group Leader of CIBER-BBN, and Scientific Director of the Large Facility ICTS NANBIOSIS. He did a postdoc at The Johns Hopkins University, MD (USA) working on molecular electronics. His research interest focuses on Molecular Functional Materials, Molecular Nanoscience, and Nanomedicine. Prof. Veciana co-authored more than 500 journal articles and book chapters, 16 international patents receiving in 2001 the Solvay Award and in 2004, the RSEQ Award for his research in chemistry. In 2005 he received the DuPont Award for his contributions in Molecular Nanoscience.
Prof Kehui Wu, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Kehui Wu is a research group leader in the State Key Laboratory for Surface Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), and also a professor of University of CAS. He received his Ph.D. degree in condense matter physics from the Institute of Physics, CAS in 2000. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Materials Research in the Tohoku Univ., Japan from 2000 to 2004. In 2005 he received support from the “100 Talent” project by the Chinese Academy of Science and joined the Institute of Physics. His research field is the growth of low dimensional materials (particularly 2D materials) by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), and atomic level studies by scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS) based techniques. His recent works include pioneering experimental discoveries of silicene and 2D boron (borophene).
Prof Masahiro Yamashita, Tohoku University, Japan
Masahiro Yamashita was born in 1954 in Saga, Japan. He received his B. Sc. degree in 1977, M. Sc. in 1979, and D. Sc. in 1982 from Kyushu University. After his graduation, he joined the Institute for Molecular Science (IMS). In 1985, he was appointed as Assistant Professor at Kyushu University. In 1989, he was appointed as Associate Professor at Nagoya University, and he was promoted to full Professor at the same university in 1998. He was a full Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University from 2000 to 2004. He is now a full Professor at the Department of Chemistry in Tohoku University. He is working on the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) project at the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST) from 2012. He is also working as the project leader of a Grant- in Aid for Creative Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (A) from 2014. He has been honored with the Inoue Scientific Award (2002), the Chemical Society of Japan Award for Creative Work (2005), and the Award of Japan Society of Coordination Chemistry(2014). He is now Associate Member of Science Council of Japan. He is also Associate Editor of Dalton Transactions as well as Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC).
Prof Dapeng Yu, Peking University, China
D. P. Yu was promoted to full professor in 1999 in Peking University. He was then supported by the Outstanding Young Scientists Funding by NSFC in 2000. He was further sponsored by the Chang Kung Professorship in 2002 by Ministry of Education, China. Prof D. P. Yu is among the world leaders in developing method to synthesize and characterize 1-dimensional semiconductor nanowires from the bottom, and made important contributions to the investigations of nanowire materials.
His group has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers in nanowire materials and physics. His work has been also recognized by important awards such as the awards from the Ministry of Education for “1-D Nanostructured Materials and Physics”; 1st class, 2004, P. R. China, and the “National Natural Science Award” “1-D Nanostructured Materials and Physics”, 2nd class, P. R. China, 2007. Prof. Dapeng Yu has mentored more than 60 graduates.
Prof Jin Zhang, Peking University, China
Prof. Jin Zhang received his PhD from Lanzhou University in 1997. After a two year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leeds, UK, he returned to Peking University where he was appointed Associate Professor (2000) and promoted to Full Professor in 2006. In 2013, he was appointed as Changjiang professor. He also is the Fellow of RSC. His research focuses on the controlled synthesis and spectroscopic characterization of carbon nanomaterials. Dr. Zhang has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles. And he now is the editor of Carbon.