AMN11

Plenary Speakers

Moungi Bawendi

Professor Moungi Bawendi received his A.B. in 1982 from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in 1988 from The University of Chicago. This was followed by two years of postdoctoral research at Bell Laboratories, working with Louis Brus, where he began his studies on nanomaterials. Bawendi joined the faculty at MIT in 1990, becoming Associate Professor in 1995 and Professor in 1996.

Professor Bawendi was one of the initial developers of the field of colloidal quantum dots. He has followed an interdisciplinary research program that has probed the science and technology of chemically synthesized nanostructures. His work has advanced both the fundamental studies of nanomaterials as well as their applications. His laboratory has demonstrated applications of nanomaterials for light emission, photodetection, spectral sensing, solar energy harvesting, and bio-imaging. His group has pioneered novel tools for the spectroscopy of single nanostructures as well as for in-vivo imaging.

Professor Bawendi is a co-laureate of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Thomas Bennett

Tom was born in South Shields, in the North-East of England, in 1986. He read the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Chemistry and gaining a 1st class MSci (Hons) in 2008. He then moved across to the Materials Science and Metallurgy Department, to study the physical properties of porous hybrid frameworks under Professor Anthony Cheetham FRS.

He now leads the research group of Professor Thomas Douglas Bennett, at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, focusing on the synthesis and characterisation of functional disordered materials. Their aim is to explore the materials space created by the formation of amorphous solids, gels, liquids and glasses from hybrid materials such as MOFs and hybrid perovskites.

In his career to date, Tom has been fortunate enough to receive the EPSRC post-doctoral prize (2012), the Panalytical award for an outstanding contribution to X-ray diffraction (2013), the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Science Impact Award (2018), the Woldemar A. Weyl award for glass science (2019), the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Chemistry (2019), the Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison Meldola Memorial Prize (2020) and the Chemical Communications Lectureship (2022).

Róisín Owens

Róisín M. Owens is Professor of Bioelectronics at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College. She is deputy head of the School of Technology at Cambridge, in charge of research and strategy. She received her BA in Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Southampton University. She carried out two postdocs at Cornell University, on host-pathogen interactions. From 2009-2017 she was group leader in the dept. of bioelectronics at Ecole des Mines de St. Etienne, on the microelectronics campus in Provence. She has received several awards including the European Research Council starting and consolidator grants. She is a 2019 laureate of the Suffrage Science award. From 2014-2020, she was principle editor for biomaterials for MRS communications (Cambridge University Press). In 2020 she became Scientific Editor for Materials Horizons (RSC). She is author of 130+ publications, and 3 patents and her work has been cited more than 9000 times. With her group, she studies the integration of electronic devices with biological systems for continuous monitoring, from cell membranes to tissues and organs, with a particular interest in studying the microbiome-gut-brain axis.

Beatriz Roldán Cuenya

Prof. Dr. Beatriz Roldán Cuenya is currently the director of the Interface Science Department as well as interims director of Inorganic Chemistry Department at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin (Germany). She began her academic career by completing her MSc in Physics in Spain in 1998 and a PhD in Physics in Germany in 2001. Her postdoctoral research took her to the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA). In 2004 she joined the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida as Assistant Professor becoming a full professor in 2012. In 2013, she moved back to Germany and became a Chair professor of Solid State Physics at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She then joined the FHI in 2017.

Prof. Dr. Beatriz Roldan Cuenya is the author of approximately 220 peer-reviewed publications. She serves in the editorial board of the Journal of Catalysis and the Chemical Reviews journal. She is a member of the Academia Europaea. Recently she received the Manchot Research Professorship from TU Munich (2023), the 2022 Paul H. Emmet Award of the North American Catalysis Society, the Röntgen Medal (2022), the Faraday Medal from The Electrochemistry Division of the UK Royal Society of Chemistry (2022), the AVS Fellow Award (2021) and the International Society of Electrochemistry-Elsevier Prize for Experimental Electrochemistry (2021).

Jackie Yi-Ru Ying

Jackie Yi-Ru Ying is a chemist who works in the area of nanotechnology. Her research focuses on the synthesis of nanostructured materials for applications in nanomedicine, antimicrobial agents, cell and tissue engineering, biosensors and diagnostics, and green chemistry and energy. Her research is interdisciplinary in nature, with a theme in the synthesis of advanced nanostructured materials for biomaterial and catalytic applications.

Her laboratory has been responsible for several novel wet-chemical and physical vapor synthesis approaches that create nanocomposites, nanoporous materials and nanodevices with unique sizedependent characteristics. These new systems are designed for applications ranging from biosensors and diagnostics, nanomedicine and targeted delivery of drugs, cell culture substrates and biomaterials, in vitro toxicology and drug screening, pharmaceuticals and chemicals synthesis, to battery and fuel cells.