Dense ionic fluids Faraday Discussion

Claudio J. Margulis is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Iowa. His undergraduate degree is from Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) where he did research on ions in steam, his Ph.D. is from Boston University (Boston, USA) where he worked on non-adiabatic quantum dynamics, and his postdoctoral work is from Columbia University (New York City, USA) where he worked on multiple different areas including the hydrophobic effect, quantum excited states, and commenced his work on ionic liquids. He was an NSF CAREER Award recipient and is a Kavli Fellow since 2003. Research in the Margulis group is theoretical and computational, although students may venture out and also perform some experiments. The focus of his group’s work through the years has been on the statistical and quantum mechanics of liquids, with an emphasis on ionic liquids and molten salts. Specifically, they work on the structure and structural dynamics of ionic systems in the condensed phase, including the interpretation of scattering and spectroscopy experiments.

Rob Atkin is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Western Australia (UWA). He obtained his PhD from the University of Newcastle (Australia) in 2003 and then completed a post doc at Bristol University (UK). In 2005 Rob was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney. He returned to Newcastle in 2007 as a University of Newcastle Research Fellow, was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship in 2012, and promoted to Professor in 2015. In 2017 Rob moved to his current role at UWA. Rob has >200 career publications which have attracted >16000 citations. His research interests include ionic liquids and deep eutectic solvents, liquid nanostructure in the bulk and at electrodes, surfactant and polymer adsorption, Stern layer structures and locally concentrated ionic liquid electrolytes.  Rob makes extensive use of facilities in the UWA Centre for microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis (including video rate atomic force microscopy) and external radiation scattering facilities such as ANSTO and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source.

Margarida Costa Gomes obtained her Chemical Engineering degree and her PhD in
Experimental Thermodynamics in Lisbon, Portugal. She was a research associate at
Imperial College in London and a post-doctoral fellow at the Blaise Pascal University
in France before joining the CNRS in 1998 and becoming a CNRS Research Professor in 2010. She was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2003 and in 2004 she passed her Habilitation. Margarida was an invited researcher in 2008 at the Institute of Chemical and Biological Technology, Portugal and in 2014-15 she was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, where she maintained a position as research affiliate until 2020. Her interests concern the physical chemistry of liquids and solutions containing ionic species and the molecular and experimental thermodynamics of fluid phases, her research concerning chemistry, engineering and environmental aspects. She is driven by challenging scientific questions at the intersection of these fields, especially where they have relevance to societal outcomes or to innovative applications.

Prof Karen Edler is Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Chemistry Department at Lund University, Sweden. Previously, she was Professor of Soft Matter and Associate Dean (Research) for the Science Faculty at the University of Bath. Edler worked at Bath in the Department of Chemistry since 1999, first as a postdoc, then a Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society Research Fellow (2000-2004). In 2014 she was appointed as the first female professor in Chemistry at Bath. She moved to Lund in May 2022.
Prof Edler’s research focuses on understanding formation of sustainable functional hierarchically structured materials. This includes characterisation of solutes and self-assembly of amphiphiles in novel deep eutectic solvents, growth of inorganic nanoparticles in these new mixtures, novel biodegradable surfactant synthesis, sustainable Pickering emulsions and thickeners for aqueous formulations and nanodiscs for membrane protein & drug encapsulation. Her group uses self-assembly, driven by interactions between nanoscopic species (micelles, nanoparticles, polymers) in solution and at interfaces to form hierarchically ordered materials with structures from nm to cm. Understanding interactions between surfaces, nanoparticles and other species is central to control over structure and thus function. Time-resolved X-ray & neutron reflectivity, liquid diffraction and small angle scattering are used to study interactions & final structures, and a range of other complementary techniques are applied to determine formation mechanisms and structures across many length scales. Extensive collaborations with other groups in industry and academia apply the novel materials synthesised in her group to applications from photocatalysis, to drug delivery and “green” gels/emulsions.

Photograph taken by ​Kennet Ruona 

Kateryna Goloviznina is a post-doctoral researcher from the PHENIX laboratory, Sorbonne University. She obtained her Master degrees in V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine) and the University of Lille (France) in 2018. Three years later, in the ENS Lyon (France), she defended her PhD thesis on the development of advanced molecular interaction models with explicit polarisation effects applied to ionic liquids, deep eutectic solvents, and electrolytes. Currently, she focuses her research on solvation effects in ionic fluids and works on the rational design of electrolytes for batteries and supercapacitors.

Dr. Alexis Grimaud received his PhD from the University of Bordeaux in 2011 and is currently an associate professor in the chemistry department at Boston College. Prior to that position, he served as CNRS Researcher from 2014 to 2022 at the Collège de France, Paris, France. Dr. His research efforts focus on understanding complex interfacial processes at the heart of electrochemical systems, including water electrolyzers and Li-ion batteries, for which he is developing and studying novel liquid electrolytes with tailored reactivity that he is using to allow intercalation into novel classes of materials. Dr. Grimaud’s achievements were recognized by the French Young Researcher award as well as the Young Researcher award from the Energy Division of the French Chemical Society.

Monika Schönhoff is a full professor for Polymers and Nanostructures at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at Münster University, Germany. She studied Physics at the University of Hannover and received her PhD at the University of Mainz in 1994 working on ultrathin organic films. As a postdoctoral researcher at University of Lund, Sweden, she turned to applying NMR methods to study colloidal systems and thin layers and consecutively built up an own research group at the Max-Planck-Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany, from 1998. At the University of Münster, Germany, she was appointed as associate professor of Technical Physical Chemistry in 2003, and became full professor of Polymers and Nanostructures in 2011. Her research interests include self-assembled materials, functional polymers and porous materials as well as electrolyte materials, including ionic liquids, polymer electrolytes and gel electrolytes. Her main interest is to study transport and dynamics of ions or other molecular entities in order to elucidate molecular processes in functional materials. To achieve this, her group is relying on NMR transport experiments, including multinuclear diffusion, spin relaxation and in particular electrophoretic NMR.

Yuki Yamada is currently a full professor at SANKEN, Osaka University in Japan. He majored electrochemistry and received his PhD from Kyoto University in 2010. The same year he moved to the University of Tokyo as an assistant professor and was promoted to a lecturer in 2018 and an associate professor in 2020. In 2021, he moved to SANKEN, Osaka University as a full professor. His current research interests focus on the development of new battery materials and reactions.