Work package lead: Prof. Peter Edwards
Peter Philip Edwards FRSCFRS (born 1949, Liverpool) is British Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and former Head of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford.[1] Edwards is the recipient of the Corday-Morgan Medal (1985), the Tilden Lectureship (1993–94) and Liversidge Award (1999) of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996 and was awarded the 2003 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society “for his distinguished work as a solid state chemist. He has made seminal contributions to fields including superconductivity and the behaviour of metal nanoparticles, and has greatly advanced our understanding of the phenomenology of the metal-insulator transition”. In 2009 Edwards was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and he was elected Einstein Professor for 2011 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he was awarded the Bakerian Lecture by the Royal Society “in recognition of decisive contributions to the physics, chemistry and materials science of condensed matter, including work on the metal-insulator transition”. In the spring of 2012 he was elected International Member of the American Philosophical Society; one of only four people from the UK in that year to be awarded this honour across all subjects and disciplines. Later in 2012 he was awarded the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers Materials Science Venture Prize for his work on new, low-cost, high-performance conducting oxide coatings for solar cells and optoelectronic materials. In the Autumn of 2013 he was elected Member of Academia Europaea, and he was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
Co-investigator: Xiao Tiancun
Dr Tiancun Xiao is a visiting professor of Beijing University of Chemical Engineering, he Joined Oxford Chemistry‟s Wolfson Catalysis Centre in 1999 and Royal Society BP Aramco Research Fellow. In the year 2000, Tiancun manufactured catalysts that were: cheaper than existing catalysts, delivered the same high levels of performance. Then Tiancun approached the technology transfer company for the University of Oxford.
Tiancun’s research is driven by developing better chemical process and nano-materials (both chemical and bio materials) for industrial application and human beings. They have made use of chemical principles and techniques to understand and explore catalysts and process. We focus on the catalyst preparation and application in petrochemical chemical process.
Research Associate: Benzhen Yao
Benzhen Yao currently works at the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford. Benzhen does research in Catalysis, Chemical Thermodynamics and Chemical Kinetics.