Iain McCulloch

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Iain McCulloch is the Gerhard R. Andlinger ’52 Professor for Energy and the Environment, and Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University, and a Professor of Polymer Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford since 2020. Prior to this, he held joint appointments as Professor of Chemical Science and Director of KAUST Solar Center at KAUST, as well as a Chair in Polymer Materials in the Chemistry Department at Imperial College. Previously, he spent 18 years managing industrial research groups at Hoechst in the US and Merck in the UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the European Academy of Sciences and a Member of Academia Europaea. He is the recipient of the 2022 Royal Society Armourers and Brasiers Prize, the 2020 Blaise Pascal Medal for Materials Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry 2020 Interdisciplinary Prize, 2014 Tilden Medal for Advances in Chemistry and the 2009 Creativity in Industry Prize. His interests are in the design and investigation of organic semiconducting materials.
The polymer semiconducting polymer designs originating from the McCulloch group have led to important breakthroughs in new bioorganic electronic materials, resulting initially in the first demonstration of a solid-state optical sensor for sensitive and selective measurement of Na and K ions, important for electrolyte balance in extracellular and intracellular fluids and cell regulation (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2016, 26, 514). Going beyond the limitations of optical sensing, McCulloch then designed new materials that specifically interact with biologically relevant ions and metabolites in electrical devices such as electrochemical transistors (OECTs). He designed the first intrinsic semiconducting polymers used in an OECT, providing the field with key synthetic design guidelines, published in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 2016, 113, 12017 and was first to show that electron transport in an OECT operated in an aqueous electrolyte in ambient conditions was possible, published in Nat. Commun. 2016, 7, 13066. This discovery provided the impetus to develop a new class of metal ion sensor for biological applications. Further work has led to their employment in the detection of lactate (Sci. Adv. 2018, 4(6), eaat0911/1) and glucose (Nat. Mater., 2020, 19 456), exciting achievements which lead the field and attracting significant commercial interest, due to their huge potential societal impact in healthcare. McCulloch additionally devised and demonstrated a new approach to polymerisation of conjugated aromatic semiconducting polymers, circumventing the necessity for transition metal catalysts with a simple aldol condensation coupling reaction. The aromatic repeat units in this polymer class, published in Nat. Commun. 2018, 9, 416, are linked by carbon-carbon double bonds, thus rigidifying the polymer backbone, ensuring it is conformationally locked and thus of very low energetic disorder. This route also opened up the possibility to synthesise completely electron poor polymers, which have high electron mobility. These polymers have been successfully exploited in both bioorganic electronics and thermoelectrics, and the basic design motif has been subsequently used by many groups in their polymer semiconductor structures. The breadth of Iain’s impact on current environmental challenges is also evident in the emerging area of solar fuels. He developed nanoparticle photocatalysts (Nat. Mater., 2020, 19, 559, – cited already 260 times) fabricated from organic semiconductors , as a potentially transformative technology in efficiently converting sunlight and water to hydrogen fuel, demonstrating that blending two semiconductors achieved significantly higher hydrogen evolution than the current state of the art (Nat. Energy., 2022, 7, 340). This pioneering work has stimulated a new area of research for the organic semiconducting community.

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