Journal of Materials Chemistry Blog

We are delighted to announce this open call for papers to contribute to a themed collection for Journal of Materials Chemistry C on Transport in Organic and Hybrid Semiconductors, guest edited by Dr Oana Jurchescu (Wake Forest University, USA), Dr Yuning Li (University of Waterloo, Canada), and Dr Simone Fabiano (Linköping University, Sweden). For more details about the Open Call and how to submit, see this blog post.

Dr Oana Jurchescu (Wake Forest University, USA)

Oana D. Jurchescu is a Baker Professor of Physics at Wake Forest University (USA) and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She received her PhD in 2006 from University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA. Her expertise is in charge transport in organic and organic/inorganic hybrid semiconductors, device physics and semiconductor processing. She has received numerous awards for her research and teaching, including the NSF CAREER Award, the NSF Special Creativity Award, and the Pegram Award from the American Physical Society.

Dr Yuning Li (University of Waterloo, Canada)

Dr. Yuning Li is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo and a member of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN). He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in polymer materials from Dalian University of Technology in China in 1985 and 1988, respectively, and completed his Ph.D. in materials science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in 1999.

Before joining the University of Waterloo in 2010, Dr. Li gained extensive research experience at institutions such as Simon Fraser University, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC), and the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) at the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore.

Since 1999, Dr. Li has focused on printed electronics, particularly organic light-emitting diodes, organic thin-film transistors, and organic photovoltaics. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, with an h-index of 64 and more than 18,000 citations. His innovative contributions have also led to 76 U.S. patents and the commercialization of multiple products.

Dr Simone Fabiano (Linköping University, Sweden)

Simone Fabiano is an associate professor and docent in Applied Physics at Linköping University, Sweden. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Palermo in 2012. During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting scholar at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He then held postdoctoral positions at both Linköping University (2012-2015) and Northwestern University (2016-2017) before returning to Linköping University to establish his research group. In 2020, he founded n-Ink AB, a spinout company that focuses on developing n-type organic conductive inks, where he serves as the Chief Scientific Officer. His group at Linköping University primarily focuses on developing organic dopant-free conductors and mixed ionic-electronic conductors for printed electronics and neuromorphic hardware applications. He has received several awards, including the Swedish Research Council Starting Grant in 2017 and Consolidator Grant in 2023. He is also a Wallenberg Academy Fellow.

We are delighted to announce this open call for papers to contribute to a themed collection for Journal of Materials Chemistry C on Transport in Organic and Hybrid Semiconductors, guest edited by Dr Oana Jurchescu (Wake Forest University, USA), Dr Yuning Li (University of Waterloo, Canada), and Dr Simone Fabiano (Linköping University, Sweden).Organic and hybrid semiconductors have garnered significant interest due to their potential for flexible, lightweight, and low-cost electronic and optoelectronic devices. Understanding and controlling charge transport in these materials is crucial for advancing their applications. This Journal of Materials Chemistry C collection aims to showcase the latest breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding and technological advancements related to charge transport in organic and hybrid semiconductors.

Appropriate topics include, but are not limited to:

• Charge carrier mobility measurements and modeling
• Understanding the role of defects and impurities in charge transport
• Novel device architectures for improved charge transport
• Interface engineering for efficient charge injection and extraction
• Theoretical and computational studies of charge transport mechanisms
• Applications of organic and hybrid semiconductors in transistors, solar cells, light-emitting diodes, and other devices

Please consider contributing to this open call for papers for our upcoming themed collection on Transport in Organic and Hybrid Semiconductors to be published in Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

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.

This call for papers is open for the following article types:

• Communications
• Full papers

Open for Submissions until 25 March 2025

If you would like to contribute to this themed collection, you can submit your article directly to the online submission service for Journal of Materials Chemistry C. Please mention that this submission is a contribution to the Transport in Organic and Hybrid Semiconductors collection in the “Themed issues” section of the submission form and add a “Note to the Editor” that this is from 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, and inclusion of accepted articles in the final themed issue is not guaranteed.

Please also note that all submissions will be subject to initial assessment and rigorous peer review to meet the usual high standards of Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

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.