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Chemistry Academic Secures EPSRC funding for new centre of excellence.

Dr Stuart Mackenzie, Department of ChemistryDr Stuart Mackenzie, of the Department of Chemistry, has been awarded one of the country’s few EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ) research fellowships – with an additional award to provide a centre of excellence.

The prestigious research fellowships ordinarily provide the recipient with five years’ worth of funding for administrative and teaching support, to enable five years’ worth of full-time research. However, Dr Mackenzie’s award has generated additional funding that will allow him to significantly advance the research profile of the University with his work with metal clusters.

Little is currently known of the complex relationship between geometrical structure and reactivity of metal clusters, and this makes this research particularly exciting.

The awards are given only to the UK’s most outstanding researchers. Dr Mackenzie’s collaborations between spectroscopists, mass spectrometrists and surface scientists from Warwick’s Chemistry and Physics departments, has stimulated the EPSRC to provide an additional £400,000 to create a sustainable interdisciplinary centre of excellence for the study of reactive metal clusters and nanoparticles.

Dr Mackenzie’s work is unique in that it develops sophisticated laser spectroscopic methods to generate clusters with known structural forms, which allows research into the predictability and controllability of the reactive qualities of these unique matter states - a development that is expected to raise the University’s international profile significantly in both physics and chemistry, and attract further numbers of high quality PhD Students to the Department.