Professor Iain McCulloch

Professor Iain McCulloch has a BSc and PhD from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde. His research career began in industry, for Hoechst AG in the United States and then Merck KGaA in England, where he was responsible for research and development, inventions and commercial products in functional materials for optics and electronics. He has made discoveries in chemical design and synthesis to control the assembly of organic semiconducting molecules to form ordered structures with high performing electrical and optical properties, for use in a range of devices including transistors and solar cells.

Professor McCulloch transitioned to academia in 2007, where he currently holds positions as Chair in Polymer Materials within the Chemistry Department at Imperial College, Professor of Chemical Science at KAUST, and as the Director of KAUST Solar Center. He was awarded the 2009 Royal Society of Chemistry Creativity in Industry Prize, the 2014 Royal Society of Chemistry Tilden Prize for Advances in Chemistry and the 2020 Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences in Materials Science, as well as a 2014 Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award. In 2020 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.