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Biography
Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff CBE FRS FREng studied at King's College, Cambridge, B.A (1969) and Ph.D. (1973) under the supervision of J. J. Turner FRS on the Matrix Isolation of Large Molecules. In 1972, he was appointed Research/Senior Research Officer in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1979, he moved to a Lectureship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. Promotion to Reader in Inorganic Chemistry and then to Professor of Chemistry followed in 1985 and 1991 respectively. In addition, he is Honorary Professor of Chemistry at Moscow State University (currently suspended). From 1994-99, he held an EPSRC/Royal Academy of Engineering Clean Technology Fellowship at Nottingham. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (2002), of the RSC (2002) and of the IChemE (2004). He was awarded CBE (2008) for "Services to Sciences", and knighted in 2015 for "Services to the Chemical Sciences". He was made Honorary Member of the Chemical Society of Ethiopia (2008) and Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2011) and Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society (2015). In 2012, He was elected a Fellow of the Academia Europaea and, in 2013, Associate Fellow of TWAS, the World Academy of Science and Associate Member of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (2014), Honorary Fellow of the RSC (2015), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2016) and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2017). He was a Council Member of the IChemE (2009-13) and Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society (2011-16) In 2018, he was appointed Honorary Professor at Beijing University of Chemical Technology and was awarded the 2019 James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public by the American Chemical Society. He received an Dr hon causa from the New University of Lisbon (2019), and Honorary Doctorates from Newcastle University (2022) and Warwick University (2023). In 2021, a Nottingham Tram was named in his honour and in 2022 he was appointed Honorary Freeman of the Borough of Broxtowe. His research interests are focussed on supercritical fluids, continuous reactions and their applications to Green and sustainable Chemistry.. Since 2008, he and his colleagues have collaborated with videomaker Brady Haran to make chemistry videos for the YouTube channel Periodic Videos.
Research Summary
Current research interests involve chemical applications of supercritical fluids, with particular emphasis on Green Chemistry; (MP was Chair of the Editorial Board (2006-12) of the RSC journal Green… read more
Current Research
Current research interests involve chemical applications of supercritical fluids, with particular emphasis on Green Chemistry; (MP was Chair of the Editorial Board (2006-12) of the RSC journal Green Chemistry www.rsc.org/greenchem. The principal areas of his research are: Supercritical Fluids: New approaches to monitoring Phase behaviour in Supercritical Fluids; Continuous Reactions of Organic compounds in supercritical carbon dioxide including Hydrogenation, Etherification, Acid-catalysed Reactions and Biocatalysis; Reactions in Supercritical Water including selective oxidation of aromatic compounds, formation of metal oxide nanoparticles and vibrational spectroscopy. From 2005-12, MP Led the EPSRC/HEFCE Science & Innovation project DICE, Driving Innovation in Chemistry & Engineering, which is promoting research collaboration between chemists and chemical engineers at Nottingham and beyond, www.nottingham.ac.uk/dice.