Professor Saiful Islam | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | University College London (BSc, PhD) |
Known for | Chemistry of Energy Materials Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (2016 Lecturer) |
Awards | IOM3 Robert Perrin Award (2023) Hughes Medal (2022) American Chemical Society Award for Energy Chemistry (2020) RSC Peter Day Award for Materials Chemistry (2017) Wolfson Research Merit Award (2013–2018) RSC Sustainable Energy Award (2013) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Materials chemistry Lithium-ion batteries Solid-state battery Perovskite solar cells |
Institutions | University of Oxford University of Bath University of Surrey The Eastman Kodak Company University College London |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Catlow FRSC FRS FInstP |
Website | www |
Saiful Islam FRSC FIMMM (born 14 August 1963) is a British chemist and professor of materials modelling at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. Saiful is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and received the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Merit Award and Hughes Medal, and the American Chemical Society Award for Energy Chemistry for his major contributions to the fundamental atomistic understanding of new materials for lithium batteries and perovskite solar cells.
Saiful is an atheist [1] who refused the Order of the British Empire citing discomfort with the phrase "British Empire" and its link to colonialism. [2]
Saiful was born in 1963 in Karachi, Pakistan to ethnically Bengali parents. [3] The family moved to London in 1964 and he grew up in Crouch End, north London. There he went to Stationers' Company's School, a state comprehensive. He received both a BSc degree in chemistry and a PhD (1988) from University College London, where he studied under Professor Richard Catlow. Subsequently, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Eastman Kodak laboratories in Rochester, New York, working on oxide superconductors. [4]
Saiful returned to the UK in 1990 to become a lecturer, then reader, at the University of Surrey. In January 2006 he was appointed professor of Materials Chemistry at the University of Bath. [5] [6] His group applies computational methods combined with structural techniques to study fundamental atomistic properties such as ion conduction, defect chemistry and surface structures. [7] [8] In January 2022, he joined the Department of Materials, University of Oxford as a professor of materials modelling. [9]
Saiful has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Materials Chemistry , and sits on the advisory board of the RSC journal Energy and Environmental Science. [10] He is Principal Investigator of the Faraday Institution's 'CATMAT' project on Next-generation Lithium-Ion Cathode Materials. [11]
Saiful presented the 2016 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled "Supercharged: Fuelling the Future" on the theme of energy, a commemorative lecture series for the BBC which celebrated 80 years since the Christmas Lectures [12] were first broadcast on television in 1936. [13] The lectures were broadcast on BBC Four, and achieved over 3.5 million interactions through the BBC broadcasts and social media. Saiful was interviewed before these lectures for articles in The Guardian . [14] [15] [16] A demonstration in these lectures led to a Guinness World Record for the highest voltage (1,275 Volts) produced by a fruit battery using more than 1,000 lemons. [17] Saiful later broke that record in 2021 after using 2,923 lemons to produce 2,307.8 Volts. [18]
Saiful has served on the Diversity Committee of the Royal Society, and was selected for the Royal Society's 'Inspiring Scientists' [19] project that recorded the life stories of British scientists with minority ethnic heritage in partnership with National Life Stories at the British Library. His outreach activities include talks on energy materials to student audiences using 3D glasses organised by the TTP Education in Action at the UCL Institute of Education, London. [20] He was interviewed for The Life Scientific programme on BBC Radio 4 in October 2019. [21]
On 23 November 2022, Saiful was an invited speaker at the Brian Cox & Robin Ince's Compendium of Reason charity event, which was at the Royal Albert Hall. [22] [23]
As of 2021, Saiful lives in Bath with his wife, Gita Sunthankar (a local GP), and their two children, Yasmin and Zak. [24]
Saiful is an atheist and Patron of Humanists UK. [1]
Saiful is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) since 2008 [4] and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM), as well as Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association. [25]
Saiful has received several RSC research awards including 2008 Francis Bacon Medal for Fuel Cell Science, [26] 2011 Materials Chemistry Division Lecturer Award, 2013 Sustainable Energy Award, [27] 2013 Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society, [4] [28] [29] [3] 2017 Peter Day Award for Materials Chemistry, 2020 Storch Award in Energy Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, [30] 2022 Hughes Medal from the Royal society, [31] and the Robert Perrin Award from Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. [9]
In 2019, he declined a New Year Honours Award of an Order of the British Empire, because he is "never been comfortable with the words ‘British Empire’ in this award and the links to empire, colonialism, and slavery". [2]
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society and professional association in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the Faraday Society, and the Society for Analytical Chemistry with a new Royal Charter and the dual role of learned society and professional body. At its inception, the Society had a combined membership of 34,000 in the UK and a further 8,000 abroad.
The Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England was founded in the 1950s as the Department of Metallurgy, by William Hume-Rothery, who was a reader in Oxford's Department of Inorganic Chemistry. It is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division
George David William Smith FRS, FIMMM, FInstP, FRSC, CEng is a materials scientist with special interest in the study of the microstructure, composition and properties of engineering materials at the atomic level. He invented, together with Alfred Cerezo and Terry Godfrey, the Atom-Probe Tomograph in 1988.
James Barber was a British senior research investigator and emeritus Ernst Chain professor of biochemistry at Imperial College London, Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin and Visiting Canon Professor to Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.
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Akira Yoshino is a Japanese chemist. He is a fellow of Asahi Kasei Corporation and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya. He created the first safe, production-viable lithium-ion battery, which became used widely in cellular phones and notebook computers. Yoshino was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside M. Stanley Whittingham and John B. Goodenough.
Sir Peter George Bruce, is a British chemist, and Wolfson Professor of Materials in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. Between 2018 and 2023, he served as Physical Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society. Bruce is a founder and Chief Scientist of the Faraday Institution.
David Phillips, is a British chemist specialising in photochemistry and lasers, and was president of the Royal Society of Chemistry from 2010 to 2012.
Derek John Fray is a British material scientist, and professor at the University of Cambridge.
Matthew Jonathan Rosseinsky is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool. He was awarded the Hughes Medal in 2011 "for his influential discoveries in the synthetic chemistry of solid state electronic materials and novel microporous structures."
Professor Dame Molly Morag Stevens is Professor Molly Stevens FREng FRS is the John Black Professor of Bionanoscience at the University of Oxford Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics. She is Deputy Director of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery and a member of the Department for Engineering Science and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering.
Dame Clare Philomena Grey is Geoffrey Moorhouse Gibson Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Grey uses nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study and optimize batteries.
Jean-Marie Tarascon FRSC is Professor of Chemistry at the Collège de France in Paris and Director of the French Research Network on Electrochemical Energy Storage (RS2E).
Véronique Gouverneur is the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Prior to the Waynflete professorship, she held a tutorial fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. Her research on fluorine chemistry has received many professional and scholarly awards.
Paul O'Brien was professor of Inorganic Materials at the University of Manchester. where he served as head of the School of Chemistry from 2004 to 2009 and head of the School of Materials from 2011 to 2015. He died on 16 October 2018 at the age of 64.
Jeff Dahn is a Professor in the Department of Physics & Atmospheric Science and the Department of Chemistry at Dalhousie University. He is recognized as one of the pioneering developers of the lithium-ion battery, which is now used worldwide in laptop computers, cell-phones, cars and many other mobile devices. Although Dr. Dahn made numerous contribution to the development of lithium-ion batteries, his most important discovery was intercalation of Li+ ions into graphite from solvents comprising ethylene carbonate, which was the final piece of the puzzle in the invention of commercial Li-ion battery. Nevertheless, Dahn was not selected for the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which recognized only John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino.
Linda Faye Nazar is a Senior Canada Research Chair in Solid State Materials and Distinguished Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo. She develops materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion. Nazar demonstrated that interwoven composites could be used to improve the energy density of lithium–sulphur batteries. She was awarded the 2019 Chemical Institute of Canada Medal.
Anthony Roy West FRSE, FRSC, FInstP, FIMMM is a British chemist and materials scientist, and Professor of Electroceramics and Solid State Chemistry at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield.
Emma Kendrick is Professor of Energy Materials at the University of Birmingham where her work is focused on new materials for batteries and fuel cells. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining.
Jennifer L. M. Rupp FRSC is a material scientist and professor at the Technical University of Munich, visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the CTO for battery research at TUM International Energy Research. Rupp has published more than 130 papers in peer reviewed journals, co-authored 7 book chapters and holds more than 25 patents. Rupp research broadly encompasses solid state materials and cell designs for sustainable batteries, energy conversion and neuromorphic memory and computing.