Thomas Bennett, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Tom was awarded his PhD in 2012 at the University of Cambridge, where he worked with Professor Anthony Cheetham FRS on the physical properties of hybrid frameworks. He has received several fellowships and awards, including a Royal Society Research Fellowship (2016), the Woldemar A. Weyl award for glass science (2019), the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Chemistry (2019) and the Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison Meldola Memorial Prize (2020). He has held visiting positions at the University of Kyoto, the Wuhan University of Technology, and the University of Canterbury New Zealand | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, and is vice-chair of the international MOF advisory committee, and outgoing chair of the Royal Society of Chemistry Porous Materials Group.
He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, where his research group are best known for the discovery of hybrid melt-quenched glasses, and seminal works exploring the interface of the coordination polymer, MOF and glass domains. Find out more about Tom and his group on Twitter @thomasdbennett
Connie Lu, University of Bonn, Germany
Connie’s research interests span inorganic and organometallic chemistry, especially topics in chemical bonding, electronic structure, reactivity and catalysis. Her research group designs and develops bimetallic active sites, primarily in molecular complexes but also in metal-organic frameworks, to harness metal-metal interactions for small-molecule activation and catalysis.
Connie was born in Taipei, Taiwan and grew up in Miami, Florida, USA. She earned a BS degree from MIT and a PhD degree from Caltech with Jonas Peters. She was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck for Bioinorganic Chemistry with Karl Wieghardt. Connie started her independent career at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2009, received tenure in 2015, and became full professor in 2020. In 2022, Lu started as a W3 professor at the University of Bonn.
