Speakers

Andy Cooper is a Nottingham graduate (1991), also obtaining his Ph.D there in 1994. After his Ph.D, he held a 1851 Fellowship and a Royal Society NATO Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and then a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in Cambridge. In 1999, he was appointed as a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in Liverpool. He is the founding Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery, established in 2007, and was Head of Chemistry and then the first Head of the School of Physical Sciences in the period 2007-2012. He led the UK RPIF bid to establish the Materials Innovation Factory and is its first Academic Director. He is also the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design which will commence in 2016. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2015.

Andy’s research interests are polymeric materials, porous materials, supramolecular chemistry, and materials for energy production and storage. He also has a strong technical interest in high-throughput materials discovery methods. He has been awarded the Macro Group Young Researchers Award (2002), the RSC Award in Environmentally Friendly Polymers (2005), the McBain Medal (2007), the Corday-Morgan Prize (2009), the Macro Group Award (2010), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and the Tilden Prize (2014). In 2011, he was named in a Thomson Reuters list as one of the Top 100 materials scientists of the last decade, one of eight UK scientists so listed.

Eiichi Nakamura received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Tokyo Tech and remained there till 1995, when he became Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo. He is currently serving as Program Director (Chair) at Japan Agency for Science and Technology (JST), and Visiting Professor of Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. His honor includes The Chemical Society of Japan Award (2003), Humboldt Research Award (2006), Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), The Medal with Purple Ribbon, His Majesty of Japan (2009), ACS A. C. Cope Scholar Award (2010), and Einstein Professor, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Research field: synthesis and physical organic chemistry, nano-science, organic solar cells.

Peidong Yang received a B.S. in chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China in 1993 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1997. He did postdoctoral research at University of California, Santa Barbara before joining the faculty in the department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. He is currently professor in the Department of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering; and a senior faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is S. K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Chair Professor in Energy. He was elected as MRS Fellow, and a member of National Academy of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Honorary Fellow of Chinese Chemical Society, a Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and a senior fellow for Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

He is the director for California Research Alliance by BASF, and co-director for the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute. He is one of the founding members for DOE Energy Innovation Hub: Joint Center for Artificial Photosysnthesis (JCAP) and served as its north director for the first two years. Yang is an associate editor for Journal of the American Chemical Society and also serves on editorial advisory board for number of journals including Accounts of Chemical Research and Nano Letters. He was the founder of the Nanoscience subdivision within American Chemical Society. He has co-founded two startups Nanosys Inc. and Alphabet Energy Inc.

He is the recipient of MacArthur Fellowship, E. O. Lawrence Award, ACS Nanoscience Award, MRS Medal, Baekeland Medal, Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, MRS Young Investigator Award, Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics, ACS Pure Chemistry Award, and Alan T. Waterman Award. According to ISI (Thomas Reuters), Yang is ranked as No. 1 in materials science and No. 10 in chemistry for the past 10 years based on average citation per paper, and he has an h-index of 123. He is 2014 Thomas Reuters Citation Laureate in Physics. His main research interest is in the area of one dimensional semiconductor nanostructures and their applications in nanophotonics and energy conversion.

Vivian obtained her BSc and PhD from the University of Hong Kong. After spending two years on the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong (now City University of Hong Kong) faculty, she moved to the University of Hong Kong in 1990, rising through the academic ranks as Senior Lecturer (1995), Professor (1997) and Chair Professor (1999). She was Head of Chemistry for 6 years from 2000 to 2005. Since 2009, she has been the Philip Wong Wilson Wong Professor in Chemistry and Energy at the University of Hong Kong. She was elected to Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2001 at the age of 38, the youngest member of the Academy. She was also made Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2012, Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences for the Advancement of Science in Developing Countries (TWAS) in 2006, and, very recently, Foreign Member of Academia Europaea in 2015. She was the Laureate of the 2011 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award and recipient of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Centenary Medal, RSC Ludwig Mond Award, State Natural Science Award, Japanese Photochemistry Association Eikohsha Award, Chinese Chemical Society-China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) Chemistry Contribution Prize, Docteur Honoris Causa (Université de Rennes 1), Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress, Hong Kong Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, Croucher Foundation Senior Research Fellowship, Ten Outstanding Young Persons of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Outstanding Women Professionals and Entrepreneurs Award.

Professor Yam currently serves as Associate Editor of the ACS journal, Inorganic Chemistry. Her major research interests are in the areas of inorganic and organometallic chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, and metal-based molecular functional materials for sensing, organic optoelectronics, memories and solar energy research.