Assistant Professor

Research interests

My primary research focus is the design and production of new porous organic polymers and carbons for a variety of separation and storage applications. These include water purification, fractionation of complex mixtures, gas separation and storage, energy storage, and catalysis. To approach such a wide variety of applications, we use a class of densely crosslinked porous polymers, known as hypercrosslinked polymers. The key feature of these networks is their simple and robust synthesis, allowing a vast array of aromatic compounds to be used as monomeric building blocks. 

My motivation is to try to use hypercrosslinked polymers to establish a platform for targeted adsorbent design, i.e. the engineering of networks customised to tackle specific problems. For example, if certain chemical functionalities or textural properties are known to be beneficial for a given application, we can envision a sort of ‘plug-and-play’ approach, in which various building blocks are used to produce adsorbents with the desired properties. Although hypercrosslinked polymers are generally low-cost, we are always striving for ways to further improve their production and design. Our big vision is to make porous organic polymers that are competitive with leading adsorbents while remaining low cost and simple to produce