Professor Martyn Poliakoff began his academic career as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge, obtaining his 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 as a 1972-79 Research Officer in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Promotion to Senior Research Officer followed in 1973 and then to a tenured position in 1975. In 1979, he was appointed 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 to his chair in Nottingham, Professor Poliakoff is an Honorary Professor of Chemistry at Moscow State University. 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) and awarded CBE for “Services to Sciences” in the 2007/8 New Year Honours. E-mails from prospective PhD students and postdocs are always welcome.
Current research interests involve chemical applications of supercritical fluids, with particular emphasis on Green Chemistry; (MP is currently Chair of the Editorial Board 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. MP leads 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.
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