Journal of Materials Chemistry Blog

We are delighted to announce that Professor Sahika Inal has been selected as the winner of the Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship 2022.

The Journal of Materials Chemistry annual lectureship, established in 2010, honours early-career scientists who have made a significant contribution to the field of materials chemistry. Congratulations to Sahika!

“I am delighted to have this prestigious recognition and committed to contributing further to the materials chemistry research and the community”

Sahika Inal is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering with co-affiliations in Electrical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering programs at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). She has a B.Sc. degree in Textile Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (Turkey), an M.Sc. in Polymer Science, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics, both from the University of Potsdam (Germany). She completed her postdoctoral training at the Center of Microelectronics of Provence of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne (France). Her expertise is in polymer science and bioelectronic devices, particularly in the photophysics of conjugated polymers, characterization of polymer films, and the design of biosensors and actuators. Since 2016, Inal lab at KAUST exploits the functionalities of organic electronic materials, investigates ionic/electronic charge transport, and designs electronic devices that record/stimulate biological signals. Sahika is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has received recognitions including ACS PMSE Young Investigator Award 2022, Beilby Medal and Prize 2022, 2023 WCC Rising Star (ACS), and has been shortlisted for the Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Women in Science in 2021. She is the author of 97+ publications, and her work has been cited more than 7900 times.

Twitter: @InalSahika

Group website: https://bioel.kaust.edu.sa/

Please join us in congratulating Sahika on receiving the award. To celebrate, we have put together a collection of her publications in Royal Society of Chemistry journals:

Read the collection

Our 2022 runners-up

Each year we have a large number of excellent researchers nominated for the lectureship award across Journal of Materials Chemistry A, B and C. To recognise the diversity of the three journals, overall community and candidates nominated each year, going forward we have decided to additionally recognise runners-up for the Journal of Materials Chemistry lectureship.

Professor Luisa Whittaker-Brooks Luisa Whittaker-Brooks is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah. Her research centers on the design of well-defined hybrid materials with controlled morphology and interfaces that serve as conduits for deterministic and coherent energy and charge transfer for applications in energy conversion, storage, and electronics. Dr. Whittaker-Brooks received her B.S. degree in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Panama. Under a Fulbright Fellowship, she received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Chemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University. She is the recipient of the 2013 L’Oréal Fellowship for Women in Science Award and the 2015 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was named a Scialog and Cottrell Fellow by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), a Talented 12 by C&En news, and a GERA Ovshinsky Energy Fellow by the American Physical Society (APS).  She is also the recipient of a Department of Energy Early Career Award, a Sloan Fellowship in Chemistry, and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award.

Dr Jessica Wade Dr Jess Wade is a physicist specializing in materials science, with a focus on new materials for next-generation technologies. Jess is interested in the use of molecular chirality to control the spin of photons and electrons, and the development of advanced characterisation techniques to investigate and optimise their functional properties. Chiral functional materials are promising candidates for more efficient displays, more sensitive photodetectors and room temperature, low-cost spintronics. She is currently a Research Fellow at Imperial College London. She is committed to improving diversity in science, both online and offline, and she has led and contributed to several initiatives to engage girls in physics, chemistry, and engineering. Since the start of 2018 Jess Wade has written the Wikipedia biographies of women and people of colour scientists every single day. She has also written a children’s book on materials and nanoscience called “Nano: The Spectacular Science of the Very (Very) Small”.

Natalie Stingelin is a Reader at the Department of Materials, Imperial College London, UK, where she conducts research in the broad area of organic functional materials, including organic electronics, multifunctional inorganic/organic hybrids and smart, advanced optical systems based on organic matter. She has more than 70 papers, and in 2011 she received an ERC Young Investigator Award.

1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
Many of my activities are in the field of Organic Electronics, especially organic photovoltaics. Our focus thereby is to gain a better understanding of some of the fundamental process, including charge generation, charge separation and charge transport, with the key objective to establish relevant structure/processing/property interrelationships. In addition, I have started a few projects in the Organic Photonics area. For instance, we have developed a new hybrid system of a tunable refractive index and low optical loss in the visible wave-length regime. We are now working with industry to develop this material further to e.g. produce mirrors that reflect infrared irradiation. We target thereby applications towards versatile and widely applicable heat management structures for building, cars etc.

Read the full interview…

1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are currently focusing our research efforts on aggregation-induced emission (AIE), an unusual photophysical process in which light emission of organic luminogens is induced by aggregate formation. We are now working on the synthesis of new AIE molecules, decipherment of AIE mechanisms, and exploration of high-tech applications of the AIE materials.

2. What motivated you to focus on luminescent organic materials?
Luminescent processes of organic luminophores have traditionally been studied as isolated molecules in dilute solutions in academic laboratories but practically used in aqueous media or solid state for real-world applications where the luminophoric molecules tend to form aggregates. The conventional luminescent materials often show poor performances in the solid state due to the notorious aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) effect. The AIE effect is exactly opposite to the ACQ effect, which provides us a nice platform to study practically useful solid emitters. The discovery of the new AIE phenomenon has motivated us to develop new mechanistic models for luminescent processes in the condense phase and new luminescent materials for real-life applications in the solid state.

Read the full interview

1.      Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are studying the electronic properties that arise when inorganic nanocrystals are used as building blocks to construct mesostructured materials. This includes fabricating inorganic nanocomposite materials and mesoporous architectures. I am particularly interested in electrochemical materials including those for electrochromic devices and batteries, in which many individual properties such as electron and ion transport, optical absorption, and phase behaviour combine to determine the overall functional characteristics.

2.      What motivated you to focus on inorganic nanoscience?
Nanoscience offers a whole new frontier in manipulating properties through the arrangement of matter. Understanding how the size, shape, and arrangement of nanoscale building blocks combine with atomic scale structure and composition to determine material properties is exciting and often unexpected.

Click here to read the full profile…

1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are developing new methods for synthesizing complex metal oxide and chalcogenide nanocrystals.  Once we’ve developed a route and collected materials, we are currently putting a lot of effort into controlling the surface chemistry of the resulting nanocrystals.  Since small nanocrystals are predominantly surface, this is extremely important and necessary if one wants to extract any utility from these materials into a functional device.  Along those lines, we are focusing on devices for energy conversion and storage.  We are using our metal chalcogenide nanocrystals for low-cost solar cells and our metal oxide nanocrystals for dielectric capacitors.  As a synthetic chemist, I get great satisfaction when a material my group has made and labored over ends up in a device that actually works well!

2. What motivated you to focus on the synthesis and properties of nanocrystals?
Organic chemists possess an incredibly powerful toolbox of reaction chemistry that allows them to rationally design molecules with desired functionality.  Unfortunately, the toolbox for rationally designing functional inorganic nanocrystals is severely lacking.  Moreover, many synthetic preps for inorganic nanocrystals are plagued by impurities, work-up issues, low yields, and irreproducibility.  The concept of “materials by design” will never get off the ground with the existing limited design space.  We got into this area thinking we could add some synthetic perspective to the problem.

Read the full interview…

1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are trying to integrate multiple functions in a single organic-based electronic device. In other words, we are attempting to fabricate devices like field-effect transistors that can respond simultaneously to multiple yet independent stimuli. This can be achieved by developing multi-component nanostructured materials.

2. What motivated you to focus on nanoscale architectures?
During my undergraduate studies the world of the single molecules was left mostly to theoretical predictions or even to imagination. During my thesis work, about 18 years ago, I started “playing” with the Scanning Probe Microscopies. These very powerful Microscopies allowed me to really “see” the molecules, to enter their world, and to look also at their “sociology “, i.e. at the way they interact among each other on the nanoscale generating highly ordered structures at the supramolecular level.

Naturally, after several years devoted to understand and control the generation of these ordered nanostructures I became interested into learning more and more also about their properties and how one can tailor them to develop nanoscale supramolecular functional materials.

Read the full interview…

1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
I have been working on materials chemistry for more than 50 years. One of the main areas of my research has been transition metal oxides. I have investigated superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance and a variety of phenomena associated with metal oxides. In the last few years, my main interest has been multiferroic and magnetoelectric oxides. Another important area of interest is nanomaterials where I have been working on carbon nanotubes as well as graphene extensively in the last few years. One of my specialities is nanotubes and graphene-like materials of (non-carbon) layered inorganic materials. I am interested in inorganic and organic hybrid materials as well.

2. What motivated you to focus on solid state and materials chemistry?
When I started research in this area, there were very few practitioners in solid state and materials chemistry. I thought that I should start my work in this area since there was little known about chemistry of solids. It has been nice to see the subject grow in a big way in the last 2-3 decades.

Click here to read the full interview

Dr. Aron Walsh is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath. He previously held a Marie Curie Fellowship at University College London and a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. His research concerns the application and development of computational chemistry techniques for modeling the solid-state. The current focus of the Walsh group is on the systematic design of materials enhanced for energy applications.

1. Which research projects are you working on at the moment?
We are developing new sulfide materials for low-cost solar cells, designing oxide systems for transparent electronics, and optimising the electronic properties of metal-organic frameworks. To put materials modeling to the test, we are also working towards computer-controlled material synthesis.

2. What motivated you to focus on computational materials science?
I have always had a fascination with computers. In the 80s I had my trusty ZX Spectrum, in the 90s I had a state-of-the-art Pentium60 PC. When I got to use the national supercomputer for my final year project in computational chemistry at Trinity College Dublin, there was no turning back.

3. What are the hot topics in materials chemistry at the moment?
I predict big things for photoferroic materials, topological insulators and ion-conducting thermoelectrics. For solar cells, Cu₂ZnSnS₄ is the material of the moment with an explosion of research this year.

4. What current problem would you like to see science provide a solution to?
A use for graphene!

5. What do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of your career?
Interacting with scientists around the world. My collaborations with chemists and physicists in America, China, Korea, Ireland and the UK provide me with endless stimulation, inspiration and support, as well as a good excuse to travel the globe.  

6. What’s the secret to being a successful scientist?
The majority of scientists have a passion for what they do, and put in long hours trying to achieve their research goals. The perception of success is largely to do with visibility, which increasingly combines a variety of media including journal articles, conferences, the internet and social-networking. There is no magic formula, but the Research Excellence Framework may disagree!

7. Which scientist past or present do you most admire?
Gilbert N. Lewis was an exceptional physical chemist. He never won a Nobel Prize, which many would say led to his eventual death by hydrogen cyanide. His models for electron counting are still of great value to my work today, and his research was the stepping stone for Linus Pauling to provide his authoritative account of the nature of the chemical bond.

8. If you weren’t a scientist, what would you be?
My dream at ten years old was to be an accountant. No doubt, I would have been paid more, but I would have missed out on a lot of fun.

If you’re interested to learn more about research in the Walsh lab you can read a selection of papers below or check out their research pages on the group website.

     1. Magnetic properties of Fe2GeMo3N; an experimental and computational study
      J. Mater. Chem., 2012, DOI: 10.1039/C2JM32574H (Advance Article)

     2. Prediction on the existence and chemical stability of cuprous fluoride
      Chem. Sci., 2012,3, 2565-2569

     3. Structural and electronic properties of CuSbS2 and CuBiS2: potential absorber materials for thin-film solar cells
      Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2012, 14, 7229-7233

     4. Microscopic origins of electron and hole stability in ZnO
      Chem. Commun., 2011, 47, 3386-3388

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