Journal of Materials Chemistry Blog

2024 Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship winner: Dr Raphaële Clément

Dr Raphaële Clément is an Associate Professor in the Materials Department at UC Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2016 from the University of Cambridge, working under the supervision of Prof. Dame Clare Grey. She then joined the group of Prof. Gerbrand Ceder as a postdoc at UC Berkeley. Since 2018, the Clément group at UC Santa Barbara is interested in establishing materials design rules, and in optimizing materials processing approaches to advance electrochemical energy storage. The group’s expertise lies in the development and deployment of magnetic resonance and magnetometry techniques (experimental and computational) for the study of battery materials and beyond, with an emphasis on real-time, operando analysis. 

Dr Clément will be giving her Lectureship presentation at MC-17 in Edinburgh in July 2025. Register now to not miss out!

How did you feel when you were announced as the winner of the 2024 Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship?

I was thrilled. This is a wonderful recognition of the group’s hard work over the years. I have been fortunate to work with talented students and postdocs, so this award goes to them too. 

Which of your JMC publications are you most proud of and why?

This paper lead by a former student, Dr. Elias Sebti, is a textbook example of the impact of materials synthesis and processing on structure and properties. This is a study of a new class of Na-ion solid conductors, where solid-state NMR was key to understanding their complex defect and polymorphic landscape, and ion transport processes. I am proud of it because this was a complicated puzzle and we solved it!

Do you have any advice for Early-Career researchers who wish to be nominated for the 2025 JMC Lectureship award?

Don’t give up! There are many talented Early Career researchers out there, and only one receives the Lectureship every year. I applied several times and this paid off.

Maxx Q. Arguilla obtained his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of the Philippines Diliman, cum Laude, in 2011. After a one-year junior instructor position at UPD, he moved to the US and completed his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from The Ohio State University with Professor Joshua Goldberger in 2017.  He then moved to MIT as postdoctoral fellow in Professor Mircea Dinca’s group, where he focused on the growth of one-dimensional van der Waals crystals and the evolution of their physical properties as they transform into ultrathin nanowires and on establishing the fundamental anisotropic physical properties of two-dimensional metal-organic frameworks. In July 2020, Professor Arguilla joined the UC Irvine Department of Chemistry as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. His research is focused on the discovery and chemical understanding of several classes of crystalline solid state materials comprising of sub-nanometer-thick inorganic chains that are held together by weak van der Waals (vdW) or ionic interactions.

How did you feel when you were announced as a runner-up of the 2024 Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship?

Receiving the runner-up award for the 2024 JMC lectureship was a great honor for me, especially being alongside Prof. Clément and Prof. Milner who are both materials chemists whose work I truly admire!

This award is special to me and my group as it recognizes our contributions in understanding the chemistry and physics of emergent 1D and quasi-1D solids that approach the sub-nanometer-thick regime. This was especially important for us, having started during the challenging times of the pandemic as many have thought these would be very challenging and almost impossible to create and study. Personally, this recognition was special as it came from one of the family of materials chemistry journals that I have followed consistently since my formative years during my graduate studies and has continuously shaped the science that I do in my independent career. Moreover, the previous awardees and runners-up are also materials scientists that I look up to and aspire to emulate. Most importantly, this award is truly a recognition of the tremendous collective effort of the members of my group and our network of collaborators who have dedicated their time, effort, and creativity in exploring an unusual and understudied class of low-dimensional solids.

Which of your JMC publications are you most proud of and why?
Among my publications at JMC and RSC, I am most proud of my first paper in JMCC (J. Mater. Chem. C, 2017, 5, 11259-11266) where I demonstrated how micro-Raman spectroscopy can be used a probe to study the composition- and stacking-dependence of the Raman-active phonon modes in layered honeycomb Zintl phase tetrelides and their 2D van der Waals deintercalation products. This is a paper that I wrote when I was a senior graduate student but the approach that I have taken in this work has shaped how we use micro-Raman spectroscopy in my group as an enabling tool to probe the structure, lattice dynamics, and stimulus-sensitive response of various classes of low-dimensional solids, especially approaching atomic scale thicknesses. The results that we covered in this report laid ground to several fundamental studies in my independent career, such as our discovery of pronounced thermochromic behavior the helical crystal, InSeI (Advanced Materials, 2024, 36, 21, 2312597), as well as in the strong quantum confinement of Sb₂S₃ grown within single-walled carbon nanotubes and boron nitride nanotubes (Chemical Science, 2024, 15, 10464–10476).

Do you have any advice for Early-Career researchers who wish to be nominated for the 2025 JMC Lectureship award?
While many of our projects are hypothesis-driven, the most unusual results that we found in our materials systems arose from curiosity-driven research. In classes of materials where our chemical intuition is limited, there is a large, untapped opportunity to explore ideas that do not necessarily conform to the scientific norms in various fields. Thus, if there is an advice that I can give to early-career researchers, it would be to follow their scientific curiosities as these could lead to surprising discoveries that can accelerate (or change) the course of the field!

2024 Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship runner-up: Dr Phillip Milner

Phillip Milner (Phill) graduated from Hamilton College in 2010 with B.A.s in Chemistry and Mathematics, and went on to pursue his Ph.D. in Chemistry with Prof. Stephen Buchwald at MIT. There, Phill developed Pd-catalyzed fluorination and 11C-cyanation reactions of (hetero)aryl halides. Upon graduating from MIT in 2015, Phill joined the group of Prof. Jeffrey Long at the University of California, Berkeley, where he designed amine-functionalized metal–organic frameworks for CO2 capture. In 2018, Phill joined the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, where his research is focused broadly at the intersection of organic, inorganic, and materials chemistry.  Phill is a member of the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) and the Cornell Energy Systems Institute (CESI), a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow, and a field member in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Phill was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2024.

Which of your JMC publications are you most proud of and why?

It’s difficult to pick, but I would probably go with: Tristan A. Pitt, Haojun Jia, Tyler J. Azbell, Mary E. Zick, Aditya Nandy, Heather J. Kulik, Phillip J. Milner*. “Benchmarking Nitrous Oxide Adsorption and Activation in Metal–Organic Frameworks Bearing Coordinatively Unsaturated Metal Centers.” J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, 12, 3164–3174. This project was spearheaded by a fantastic graduate student, Tristan Pitt, as part of his rotation project in our lab. It also sparked our on-going collaboration with Heather Kulik using theory to understand reactivity within metal-organic frameworks. All around a great in-depth study of a difficult problem (how to activate nitrous oxide using MOFs).

Do you have any advice for Early-Career researchers who wish to be nominated for the Lectureship award?

I would encourage folks to go after difficult problems and identify ways in which they can uniquely contribute to materials science. Working on the same problem in the same way as everyone else is a great way to boost your h-index but it does not help you stand out as a unique voice in the community. I always encourage students in my lab at least to think about how to be indispensable – the one person who can solve a particular problem in a new way.

At which upcoming conferences may our community meet you?

I will be at the Nanoporous Materials Gordon Research Conference in August, and Pacifichem in December!

We look forward to receiving nominations for the 2025 Lectureship award. If you have any questions about eligibility or the selection process, please get in touch with materials-rsc@rsc.org.