New Frontiers in Inorganic Chemistry: UK-China Perspectives

Simon Aldridge is a native of Shrewsbury, England and obtained his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford (the latter for work on hydride chemistry with Tony Downs). After post-doctoral spells at Notre Dame (as a Fulbright Scholar) and Imperial College London, and a first faculty appointment in Cardiff, he returned to Oxford in 2007. He is currently Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, author of >170 papers and several patents, and a past winner of the Dalton Transactions European Lectureship and the RSC’s Main Group Chemistry Prize. In 2012 he held a University Visiting Professorship at Monash University, Melbourne and was Distinguished Lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2014. Current interests span synthetic organometallic chemistry, including novel main group systems of relevance to small molecule activation and detection.

Neil Champness is the Professor of Chemical Nanoscience at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research spans chemical nanoscience and all aspects of molecular organization, including surface supramolecular assembly, organization in the solid-state via crystal engineering and solution-based supramolecular chemistry. His research achievements have been recognised by the award of a number of Royal Society of Chemistry prizes including the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize (2006), Surfaces and Interfaces Award (2016), Supramolecular Chemistry Award (2010) and a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2011). He has been a Visiting Professor at Institute Of Chemistry – UNESP, Brazil (2009), the Institut Le Bel, University of Strasbourg, France (2011) and the University of Adelaide, Australia (2014). Neil is a Fellow of both the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). In 2011 he was identified as one of the top 100 most cited chemists of the previous decade and, in 2014 and 2015, he was identified as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher.
 

Yaofeng Chen received his PhD from Zhejiang University in 1999. After that, he did postdoctoral studies in Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (1999-2002), University of Montreal (2002-2003) and University of California, Santa Barbara (2003-2005). Since 2006, he was a research professor at the State Key Laboratory of Organometallic Chemistry, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received the Chinese National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2013. He served as the editorial advisory abroad member of Organometallics from 2012.1-2014.12. His research interests lie in the synthesis and reactivity of transition-metal complexes, especially the organometallic complexes of rare-earth metal.
 

Liang Deng is a professor of Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, China. He received his BA degree from Peking University (2002) and his Ph.D. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2006, supervisor: Prof. Zuowei Xie). After worked as postdoc fellows at CUHK and Harvard University (supervisor: Prof. R. H. Holm), he joined the faculty team of SIOC in 2009 and has been a research professor there. His research interests focus on the synthetic chemistry of reactive later 3d metal complexes and their applications in small molecule activation and catalysis. He is the awardees of the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars (2012), the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award (2013), and the ACS Organometallics Young Investigator Fellows (2014).

Zijian Guo was born in Hebei, China in 1961. After receiving his PhD degree from the University of Padua in 1994, he worked as a postdoc fellow at the University of London, the University of British Columbia and the University of Edinburgh successively. He joined Nanjing University as a full professor in 1999 and served as the director of the State Key Laboratory of Coordination Chemistry from 2000 to 2009, and the dean of the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from 2006 to 2014. He is currently the Cheung Kong professor in the same school. His research interests include metal-based anticancer complexes, fluorescent sensors for bioinorganic species, and metal-based artificial nucleases and proteases.

Jian-Ping Lang received his Ph.D. degree in 1993 from Nanjing University. During 1995-2001, he was a postdoctor at Nagoya University and at Harvard University working on Mo/Fe/S chemistry related to the FeMoco structure in nitrogenases. In 2001, he returned to Soochow University and was promoted to a full Professor of the College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. His research interests cover metal sulfide cluster chemistry, design and development of new coordination complex-based catalysts, and so on. He has published more than 320 research papers in the journals such as JACS, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. and applied 16 Chinese patents. Currently he is working as dean of the Graduate School of Soochow University. His awards include the Distinguished Young Scholar Fund by the NNSF (2005), and the Second Prize of Natural Science by Ministry of Education of China (2011). He was promoted as a Chung Kong Scholar professor by the Ministry of Education of China (2012). He is a member of International Advisory Board of Dalton Transactions and Scientific Reports and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) of UK.

Richard Layfield is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Assistant Vice-Dean for Research at The University of Manchester, U.K. Research in the Layfield group is concerned with fundamental and applied aspects of organometallic chemistry, and encompasses the rare-earth elements, main group elements and 3d transition metals. The group developed the first organo-lanthanide single-molecule magnets, and on-going work in this area is oriented towards applications in spintronic devices. The group is also interested in the NHC chemistry of base metals, particularly iron and cobalt, and their applications in the catalytic synthesis of main group substrates. Prof. Layfield’s awards include the RSC Meldola Medal and the Sir Edward Frankland Fellowship, a Rising Star Lectureship of the ICCC, and a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. In 2016, he was appointed as an Associate Editor of Dalton Transactions.
 

Paul Walton obtained his PhD degree in 1990, followed by two years as a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Ken Raymond. He joined the department of chemistry at York in 1993 as a lecturer, becoming full professor in 1999. Between 2004 and 2010 he was chair of department. He is recipient of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Higher Education Teaching Award and the RSC's Joseph Chatt Award for outstanding multidisciplinary research.  He has also been editor of Dalton Transactions (2004-2008), chair of Heads of Chemistry (UK), chair of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Diversity Committee and is one the RSC's 175 Faces of Chemistry. He is a strong advocate of gender equality and lectures widely on the subject

Haudong Wang received his BS at Peking University in 2000 and his PhD in 2005 at Texas A&M University under the supervision of François Gabbaï. He then joined the group of Gerhard Erker at the University of Münster as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow. In 2009, he joined the Department of Chemistry at Fudan University (Shanghai, China) as an associate professor and was promoted to professor in 2015. His research interests concern the synthesis of electrophilic organoboranes and their application in small molecule activation and catalysis.

Following my MSci degree at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) I carried out my PhD under the supervision of Professor Robin Bedford at the University of Bristol. This research focused on the use of Rh and Pd for directing group mediated C-H functionalization chemistry, principally for the selective formation of aryl-aryl and aryl-halide bonds. This research was supported by GSK.
In 2011 I was awarded a Government of Canada Commonwealth Research Fellowship to undertake postdoctoral research with Professor Laurel Schafer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. This research involved the use of early transition metals, primarily Ti complexes, for the synthesis of biopolymers.
In 2012 I was awarded a Bath Prize Fellowship to commence independent research in the field of catalysis with subsequent appointment to Lecturer in 2014. My research continues to span the fields of organic, inorganic and polymer chemistry, with a specific focus on the manipulation of main group-element bonds using base metal catalysts.