Dr. Sihai Yang

School of Chemistry, University of Manchester, UK

Dr Yang received his BSc in Chemistry from Peking University (2007), and PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Nottingham (2011). He has been awarded an EPSRC PhD Plus Fellowship (2010), a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2011), and a Nottingham Research Fellowship (2013) and was a senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham. In 2015, he was appointed as a lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at the School of Chemistry, University of Manchester and was promoted to senior lecturer in 2018. His awards include Nottingham University Endowed Postgraduate Prize for 2010, the Diamond Young Investigator Award of 2011, the Honourable Mention Award of International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) Prize for 2012 Young Chemists, the Institute of Physics B T M Willis Prize for 2013, the 2019 CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists and the ISIS Neutron & Muon Source Impact Awards in 2019.

He develops new porous materials for the applications in catalysis, biomass utilisation, clean air, substrate storage, separation and conductivity. His major research interest is to investigate the key chemical processes involved in host-guest binding underpinning their materials function, using in situ structural and dynamic studies by high resolution synchrotron X-ray diffraction, spectroscopy and neutron scattering, combined with computational modelling of host-guest binding process. Recent finding includes the discovery of catalytic origins and reaction intermediates for a range of important biomass catalytic conversions, and a series of new metal-organic frameworks with exciting properties for adsorptive removal of toxic air pollutants.