Keith Butler studied an undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 2004. He then completed a PhD at UCL, graduating in 2010. Following this, Keith carried out post-doctoral research in the University of Sheffield and the University of Bath, working on simulations of photovoltaics and transparent conductive oxides.

During his time at the University of Bath, Keith became interested in machine learning for the discovery and analysis of new materials. In 2018 he moved to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory where he was involved in setting up the scientific machine learning group (SciML). In 2022 Keith moved to Queen Mary University of London as a Senior Lecturer in Green Energy Materials. In 2023 Keith re-joined UCL Chemistry as Associate Professor.

Keith’s research focuses on using a combination of data-driven methods (such as deep learning and Bayesian statistics) and quantum mechanics calculations to design new materials on computers and to help accelerate the experimental characterisation of materials. His group (the Materials Design and Informatics Group) work with other academics, national facilities and companies. Keith is a keen advocate of open science and open software and is involved in the development of several community packages. In his spare time, Keith is (overly) obsessed with fermentation; he keeps a stable of several kombucha SOCBYs and will probably try to pickle your lunch if you’re not careful!

An interview with Professor Butler

What does it mean to you to join the Advisory Board of Journal of Materials Chemistry A and Materials Advances?

It’s a real honour to join this Advisory Board. I am a big fan of the RSC publishing journals and think that they have been a great service to the research community in materials chemistry over the years. So, to have an opportunity to contribute to these publications and to potentially help to shape how they develop is really exciting for me.

What is the current biggest challenge you face in your field?

I work a lot with machine learning for materials modelling and characterisation and this is a very fast-moving field right now. I think that one of our biggest challenges is distinguishing the really important work from the noise or even worse from the work that is not properly done. As this tends to be highly interdisciplinary work, it is often hard for a single person to have the expertise to judge all aspects fully. A materials chemist may not know a variational autoencoder from a diffusion model, and likewise a computer scientist may not know a halogen from a pnictide. In this case, high-quality peer reviewed publication becomes more important than ever, providing a seal of quality that researchers know that they can trust.

Why do you feel that researchers should choose to publish their work in Journal of Materials Chemistry A and/or Materials Advances?

I think that these are highly respected, widely read and trusted journals. When I think of following the latest in energy materials research (which is my main materials science interest) these are some of the first journals in my RSS feed. I know that my peers also follow these journals closely and respect the research that is published in them. So, I would say for high visibility with respectability, JMC A and Materials Advances are great places to publish. In addition, the very reasonable APCs for Gold Open Access are very attractive to me, as I am a big believer in Open Science, but find that it is sometimes a costly standard to meet. It’s great that the RSC makes open access more attainable to all researchers.

Can you tell us about one of your latest Journal of Materials Chemistry A publications?

One of my more recent publications was last year looking at hybrid halide perovskites. I’ve been working on these materials for probably about 10 years now and there is still so much about them that we are yet to properly understand. In this paper we were looking at a particular alloy of this system where the A-site of the perovskite is a mixture of formamadinium and methyl ammonium molecules and the X site is a mixture of iodine and bromine anions. This mixture is particularly interesting as it has been shown to increase the efficiency of solar cells made with halide perovskite absorber layers. The study uses a range of computational modelling techniques to look at this structure and reveals an interplay of the effects of the structure on the dynamic and thermodynamic properties of the halide perovskite alloys. This kind of atomistic understanding is critical as researchers strive to design more stable and efficient perovskite mixtures for cheap and effective solar cells.

Mixed-anion mixed-cation perovskite (FAPbI3)0.875(MAPbBr3)0.125: an ab initio molecular dynamics study Eduardo Menéndez-Proupin, Shivani Grover, Ana L. Montero-Alejo, Scott D. Midgley, Keith T. Butler and Ricardo Grau-Crespo J. Mater. Chem. A, 2022,10, 9592-9603. DOI: 10.1039/D1TA10860C

Journal of Materials Chemistry B, Materials Advances, Biomaterials Science, Nanoscale, and Materials Horizons  were delighted to sponsor 2 prizes each for ‘The 40th Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Drug Delivery System’, which was held in Japan from July 9th – 11th.

Please join us in congratulating Takuma Yoshikawa, Takuto Toriumi, Mitsuru Ando, Heemin Chang, Seigo Kimura, Taiki Yamaguchi, Eiji Yuba, Jeong Hoon Ko, Kyung Min Park, and Anh T.N. Dao for being selected as the winners! Find out more about them below:

Takuma Yoshikawa completed his Ph.D. in engineering at Kyushu University (Japan) in 2020. During his Ph.D. training, he was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, a research fellowship for young scientists (DC1). After the completion of his Ph.D., he worked as a technical staff at Kyushu University developing new small molecule therapeutics for chronic kidney disease as a part of a collaborative research with a pharmaceutical company in Japan. Since March 2021, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington (Advisor: Prof. Dr. Patrick S. Stayton). His main project is the development of a long-acting injectable polymeric prodrug (drugamer) for pre-exposure prophylaxis of the human immunodeficiency virus. He is leading the prodrug monomer/drugamer synthesis, developing the drugamer formulation, and performing the pharmacokinetic studies in rats and non-human primates including the quantification of drug concentration by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry.

Takuto Toriumi received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, with support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He then joined Prof. Yukio Nagasaki’s lab at University of Tsukuba as a post-doctoral researcher. Currently, He is an assistant professor at Faculty of Materials for Energy in Shimane University. His research interest is the development of biomaterials to improve healthy life expectancy, and his experiments range from the synthesis of materials to their evaluation in cells and animals. His current main theme is design and evaluation with drug delivery systems using functional polymers with antioxidants or amino acids to safely and effectively improve exercise performance.

Seigo Kimura is an assistant professor in the Integrated Research Consortium on Chemical Sciences at Nagoya University, Japan. He specializes in drug delivery of nucleic acid-based therapeutics and earned his Ph.D. under Professor Hideyoshi Harashima at Hokkaido University, where he also completed his M.S. and B.S. His research focuses on creating lipid-based nanoparticles for targeted delivery of nucleic acids (RNA, DNA) to tissues and cells. He has been investigating the in vivo delivery mechanism of LNP, uncovering the role of endogenous factors in tissue selectivity. He is also conducting functional analysis of novel nucleic acid modalities (chemically modified mRNA, circular mRNA) using LNP for therapeutic applications, such as protein replacement and cancer vaccines.

Taiki Yamaguchi is a Doctoral Course Student at the Graduate School of Pharmacy, Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences. He is sponsored by the JST SPRING scholarship, which covers the cost of living and research expenses. His study focuses on nucleic acid and gene delivery systems using ultrasound-responsive nanobubbles. This system aims to treat cancer and central nervous system diseases. He was awarded Seven Star Pharmacist Candidate Award 2022 from the Nagai Foundation Tokyo.

Eiji Yuba received BS degree from the Department of Applied Materials Science, Osaka Prefecture University (OPU), Japan in 2006. He received MS and PhD degrees from the Department of Applied Chemistry, OPU in 2008 and 2010, respectively. He worked as Assistant Professor of OPU, from 2010 to 2017 and as an Associate Professor from 2017 to date, in the Department of Applied Chemistry, OPU. Also, he stayed in the University of Chicago (Jeffrey Hubbell laboratory) as visiting scholar in 2019. He served as Fellow for Science and Technology Policy, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan from 2020 to 2023 and as Advisor to the President of Osaka Metropolitan University from 2022 to present. Recently he internally moved to the Department of Chemistry and Bioengineering as Principal Investigator. His research interests are functional polymer-based nanomaterials for biomedical applications including drug delivery, gene vectors, diagnosis and immunoengineering.

Dr. Dao received her Master’s and PhD degrees from the School of Materials Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in 2011 and 2014, respectively. From 2014 to 2017, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the JST-ImPACT Project, Japan. From 2018 until 2022, she served as an Assistant Professor at Tohoku University (Japan) and was promoted to Associate Professor at Nagasaki University (Japan) in 2022. Dr. Dao has received various academic awards, including the Shiseido Female Scientist Research Grant (2021), the Tanaka Encouragement Award for Research Related to Precious Metals (2020), and a Young Scientist Fellowship at the 67th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany (2017). Her research focuses on nanostructures of noble metals and biopolymers for applications in biosensing, diagnostics, and cancer therapy. Dr. Dao specializes in creating highly functional materials by leveraging the components’ inherent strength and advanced fabrication techniques.

Submit your work before 10 January 2025

Journal of Materials Chemistry A and Nanoscale are pleased to announce an open call for papers for a joint cross-journal collection on nanogenerators.

Ever since the first nanogenerator was invented by Wang’s group in 2005, several important fields have been evolved. Through continuous development over the years, various kinds of nanogenerators have been introduced based on their source of energy for harvesting: mechanical energy (triboelectric and piezoelectric nanogenerators), and thermal energy (pyroelectric and thermoelectric nanogenerators). Besides, different functional materials with various properties can be used in the hybridizing and coupling of different nanogenerators for harvesting different energies simultaneously. By deploying many performance-enhancing techniques, nanogenerators can supply power to portable electronics and have greater potential for a revolution in the IoT, AI, and HMI sectors.

Guest Edited by Professor Zhong Lin Wang (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA), Professor Ya Yang (Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) and Professor Pooi See Lee (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), this Journal of Materials Chemistry A and Nanoscale collection will capture the cutting-edge innovations in nanomaterials synthesis, simulation, device fabrication, and system integration that are driving this field forward.

Appropriate topics include, but are not limited to:

• Piezoelectric materials
• Ferroelectric materials
• Thermoelectric materials
• Triboelectric nanogenerators
• Piezoelectric nanogenerators
• Pyroelectric nanogenerators
• Thermoelectric nanogenerators
• Hybridized and coupled nanogenerators
• Self-powered sensors

The Editorial Office reserves the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of both the journal and the collection, and as such inclusion of accepted articles in the final themed collection is not guaranteed.

How to submit

Articles can be submitted at any time before the deadline via our online submission system to any of the participating journals. Please see the journals’ webpages linked above for more information on their scope, standards, article types and author guidelines and for more information on how to submit.

This open call is open for submissions of:

• Full Papers
• Communications

All manuscripts will undergo the normal initial assessment and peer review processes, if appropriate, in line with the journal’s high standards, managed by the journal editors. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the online collection as soon as they are published and they will be featured in a regular issue of the relevant journal and collated online into the collection. Please note that peer review or acceptance are not guaranteed.

If you would like to contribute to this themed collection, please submit your article directly through the journal submissions platform. Please quote the themed collection code XXNanGen24 when prompted in Step 4 of your submission in the “Themed issues” section of the submission form and mention that this is in response to the Open Call. The Editorial Office reserves the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of both the journal and the collection.

If you have any questions about the collection or the submissions process, please do contact the Editorial Office at materials-rsc@rsc.org and they will be able to assist.

Your institute may have a Read & Publish agreement in place with the Royal Society of Chemistry. This means that you may be able to publish gold open access for free in all the hybrid journals we publish – maximising the visibility and impact of your article to the broadest possible audience. Your institution’s agreement may already include the article processing charge for publishing as a corresponding author. Check here to find out more and to see if your institution has an R&P deal in place.

We look forward to receiving your submission!

New Journal of Materials Chemistry A Scientific Editor

Welcome to Sofía Calero

Journal of Materials Chemistry A is delighted to welcome Prof. Sofía Calero to the Editorial Board as a Scientific Editor. Please join us in congratulating Sofía on her new role and find out more about her in the interview below:

Sofía Calero is a professor of Applied Physics and chairs the Materials Simulation and Modelling group at the department of Applied Physics and Science Education, at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. Dr. Calero is part of the Board of Directors of the International Adsorption Society and the Spanish Adsorption Group, which she currently chairs. She is the author of over 300 refereed scientific publications  and has been the recipient of numerous prestigious scientific prizes and Awards, including the Marie Curie Excellence Award, ERC Consolidator Grant, Salvador de Madariaga Grant, Dutch VPP-KNAW grant, Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry awards for Young Researchers and later on for Scientific Excellence and the Irene Curie Grant. Her research involves the application of molecular simulation to industrially relevant systems and the development of force fields, algorithms and simulation methods to reverse-engineer properties of porous materials. What does it mean to you to join the Editorial Board, as a Scientific Editor on Journal of Materials Chemistry A? Joining the board as a Scientific Editor gives me the opportunity to be in touch with the most advanced science in the materials field. This is great for me, as I understand it would be for all those scientists who enjoy the work they do. What is the current biggest challenge you face in your field? There are many. In silico work on materials is now in a very good moment. Computers are faster and we are increasingly immersed in the development of efficient methodologies. Accurate and transferable force fields remain a challenge for many systems. Examples are amorphous and defective materials, challenging properties related to energy production and storage or, in the field of adsorption, large complex adsorbates that can lead to adsorbent phase transitions. Why do you feel that researchers should choose to publish their work in Journal of Materials Chemistry A? Because it is a very good journal, addressing some of the most emerging challenges for current materials. Can you tell us about one of your latest Journal of Materials Chemistry A publications? It was related to work to evaluate the performance of adsorption heat pumps and cooling systems (https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2024/ta/d3ta05258c). To do this, we combined adsorption data of alcohols in MOFs with a thermodynamic model, generating a process that allowed us to obtain, among other properties, the coefficient of performance, the working capacity, the specific heat or cooling effect and the heat released in the adsorption and desorption cycles. Furthermore, our process has the advantage of identifying the optimal conditions for each adsorbent-fluid pair.

Materials Advances was delighted to sponsor 3 prizes for Poster Presentations at the SNAIA CRISTMAS 2023 event which took place in the Chimie Paris Tech on 13-15 December 2023.

It was difficult for the organisers to pick the prize winners due to the exceptional quality of all the posters presented at the event – the prize winners below were “truly outstanding”!

	Victor Filatov, SkyLab AG, Switzerland Poster Presentation: “Towards a restoration of cotton fabrics: the research of a novel combination based on sucrose and malic acid for cross-linking fibres and colour retention during laundry washing cycles”
	Anastasia Novikova, Ben-Grunion University on the Negev, Israel Poster Presentation: “Hollow-Micro pillared Glass Fabricated on Hollow Joe Pye Weed-Inspired Tubes for Detecting Molecular Signatures”
	Abigail Bond, University of Leeds, UK Poster Presentation: “Towards the Liquid Crystal Chemical Sensor via Confinement Within a Stripe Pattern”

Congratulations to the winners from the Materials Advances team!

If you would like to attend the next edition of the event then visit the 2024 webpage here: https://cristmas.org/

SNAIA – CRISTMAS – Most Recent Innovations in Materials Science and Advanced Characterisation Methods

The 2024 event will provide a unique platform to meet, share knowledge and establish links between experts from academia and industry covering the most exciting emerging applications within fields of Photonics, (Opto)Electronics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, Engineering, Quantum Computing, and Art.

Will you be attending ACS Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference in Atlanta next week?

If so, we warmly welcome you to join our exciting session featuring cutting-edge talks from leading international researchers in the field of sustainability science, and representatives from RSC journals.

In addition to these exciting scientific talks, our speakers will take part in panel discussions examining key themes relevant to how the scientific community can help accelerate the transition to net-zero and build a more sustainable world through solutions-focussed chemistry – come and join the conversation!

Symposium details

Title: RSC Showcase Symposia: Building A More Sustainable World Through Solutions-Focused Chemistry
When: Wednesday 5^th June, 9:30am
Where: Oakwood B Room; Crowne Plaza Atlanta Perimeter at Ravinia

Speakers and Talk titles 

Fran Kerton, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Chemical conversations for a sustainable future

Adam Lee, Griffith University, Australia

Catalysing sustainable chemical manufacturing

Maria Elena Rivas, Johnson Matthey Technology Centre, UK

Mechanochemistry in Johnson Matthey

Natalie Stingelin, Georgia Tech, USA

Cool plastics for Energy Sustainability

Antonio Facchetti, Georgia Tech, USA

Sustainable synthesis of new mixed ionic-electronic conductors & devices

Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, Georgia Tech, USA

Phase transformations via surface defects in halide perovskites

Furthermore, RSC Sustainability and EES Catalysis Executive Editor, Emma Eley, will be present for the full duration of the conference and will be pleased to talk to you about your research and answer any questions that you may have about publishing in RSC journals. Stop by stand 10 in the exhibition hall to discover more about RSC Publishing, or get in touch by email to arrange a meeting with Emma.

We hope that you will be able to join us at this exciting session!

Journal of Materials Chemistry A,  Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Materials Horizons were delighted to sponsor the recent Women in Renewable Energy (WiRE) workshop at the SPIE Photonics Europe conference held in Strasbourg, France from 7 – 11 April 2024. The journals sponsored a wonderful networking event that allowed speakers and up-and-coming researchers and students to meet and share ideas in an informal setting.

Journal of Materials Chemistry A and Materials Horizons also sponsored two prizes for emerging researchers at the conference. These prizes were awarded by Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Materials Advances Editor-in-Chief Natalie Stingelin. Congratulations to Olivier Bardagot and Fabiola Faini for being awarded the prizes!

Promoting women in science is a crucial and necessary step to reach the UN sustainability goals. Regardless of your gender and academic position, you can contribute to accelerating this positive change. This idea of “everyone can and should be involved” is dear to Prof. Olivier Bardagot, a young researcher of the CNRS-University of Strasbourg (France) working in the polymer department of the ICPEES institute led by Prof. Nicolas Leclerc. Physicist by training (Phelma and Imperial College London), Olivier opened himself to organic synthesis and polymer design thanks to the mentorship of Prof. Renaud Demadrille during his PhD (CEA Grenoble, France). With this rare background, he thrived under the supervision of Prof. Natalie Banerji by developing organic electrochemical transistors during a 3-year post-doctoral stay at the University of Bern (Switzerland). Established as a permanent PI since a year, Olivier is now developing a diverse research group where the potential of scientists can flourish in a widely interdisciplinary environment supported by the Strasbourg Organic Electronic Consortium (STELORG). His group is currently focusing on controlling the nanoscale and microscale organization of semiconducting polymers to optimize their chemical and electrochemical doping for thermoelectric and bioelectronic applications. If you have common research interests, do not hesitate to contact him at: olivier.bardagot@cnrs.fr. Olivier was awarded a prize for his exceptional contribution to the WiRE workshop, sponsored by Materials Horizons.

Fabiola Faini is a Ph.D. fellow in Giulia Grancini’s group at the University of Pavia, Italy. She obtained her master’s degree in Physics of Matter in 2021, working on the optical properties of low-dimensional perovskite thin films. Her research interest spans from fundamental photophysical investigation of charge carriers dynamics in low-dimensional perovskite thin films to their rational application in operating perovskite solar cells. With her talk titled “Tilting the crystal growth of 2D Perovskites: a tool for breaking wide band gap perovskite solar cell efficiency”, she has been awarded a prize by Journal of Materials Chemistry A during the SPIE conference.

We are pleased to announce this open call for papers for our upcoming themed collection on Rare Earth Materials to be published in Journal of Materials Chemistry C. For more details about the themed collection, including how to submit, please visit this blog post.

This collection is guest edited by:

Professor Ashlee Howarth (Concordia University, Canada)

Ashlee J. Howarth is an Associate Professor and Concordia University Research Chair at Concordia University in Montréal. She was born and raised in London, Ontario. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario in 2009, and then went on to do her PhD in inorganic materials chemistry at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Michael O. Wolf. Before joining the faculty at Concordia, she completed an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University with Joseph T. Hupp and Omar K. Farha. At Concordia, the Howarth group is focused on the design and synthesis of rare-earth cluster-based metal–organic frameworks targeting applications in pollution remediation, catalysis, drug delivery, X-ray detection, and chemical sensing.

Professor Takao Mori (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan)

Takao Mori received his PhD in 1996 at Univ. Tokyo, Dept. Physics. He is a Field Director at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan. Professor of the Univ. Tsukuba Graduate School and elected Board Member of the International Thermoelectric Society (ITS) and ITS President from July 2023. Mori is a Senior Editor of Materials Today Physics, an Editorial or Advisory Board Member of Journal of Solid State Chemistry, Advances in Applied Ceramics, Device, Journal of Materiomics, Joule. His current research interests include development of thermoelectric materials and enhancement principles, magnetism, synthesis and properties of borides, inorganic materials. He has published over 350 papers, 25 book chapters, and 35 patents.

Professor Zhiguo Xia (South China University of Technology, China)

Zhiguo Xia is a professor at the State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials and Devices, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China. He obtained his PhD degree (Chemistry) in 2008 from Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His current research interests focus on the inorganic luminescence materials, including the rare earth doped phosphors and the luminescent metal halides, and mainly developed their structural design, synthesis and discovery and structure-property correlation investigations. Dr. Zhiguo Xia has published over 200 peer reviewed publications (h-index of 87), and 5 book chapters. He is an associated editor of “Journal of Materials Chemistry C from 2022”.

Open call for papers – Rare Earth Materials

Submit your work by 6 September 2024

We are pleased to announce this open call for papers for our upcoming themed collection on Rare Earth Materials to be published in Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

This collection is guest edited by Professor Ashlee Howarth (Concordia University, Canada), Professor Takao Mori (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan), Professor Zhiguo Xia (South China University of Technology, China).

Submissions to the journal should contain chemistry in a materials context and should fit within the scope of Journal of Materials Chemistry C. Please see the journal’s website for more information on the journal’s scope, standards, article types and author guidelines. Please see this blog post for further information about the guest editors.

For this open call, we welcome full Papers and Communications.

Open for Submissions until 6^th September 2024

If you would like to contribute to this themed collection, please submit your article directly through the Journal of Materials Chemistry C submission service. Please mention that your submission is a contribution to the Rare Earth Materials collection in the “Themed issues” section of the submission form and add a “Note to the Editor” that this is from the Open Call. Please do not mention the themed collection in your cover letter.

All submissions will be subject to assessment against the journal’s usual scope and standards criteria and sent for peer review only if appropriate. Accepted articles will be published online as soon as they are ready and added to the web collection.

We sincerely hope that you will be able to contribute your latest research to this themed collection. We look forward to receiving your manuscripts.

We are delighted to announce that nominations are now OPEN for the prestigious 2024 Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship. Do you know an outstanding emerging scientist in the field of materials chemistry who deserves recognition? Nominate them today for a chance to win this respected award!

Established in 2010, this international lectureship honours early-career scientists who have made significant contributions to the field of materials chemistry, with previous recipients including Shaojun Guo, Christopher Bettinger, Henry Snaith, Maria Escudero-Escribano and last year’s winner Jovana Milić.

For more information and details on eligibility criteria and how to nominate a candidate, please visit the Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship webpage.

The deadline for nominations is 5 June 2024

Nominate a candidate now

Find out more about our 2023 Lectureship winner, Dr Jovana Milić, and our two runners-up, Dr Kwabena Bediako and Dr Laure Biniek or why not check out our fantastic 2023 shortlisted candidates.

You are of course welcome to circulate this information more widely with any colleagues who might be interested in making a nomination.

We look forward to receiving your nominations!