Dr Andrew Jupp won the award for his work on sustainable catalysts and their interactions with light. In particular, his team developed a method to assess the efficiency of sustainable catalysts made from abundant elements including boron and phosphorus.
Catalysts are compounds used in industry to improve the efficiency of reactions. For example, to make them speed up, occur at a lower temperature, or reduce the amount of unwanted side-products.
More than 90 per cent of chemicals are made using catalysts, however many of the catalysts used in industry are based on precious metals. Rising production costs, and environmental concerns around the processes used to extract these metals mean that sustainability an issue.
While there are some promising methods being developed to replace these catalysts with sustainable alternatives, they have yet to make the transition to industry since they are still not as efficient as their precious metal counterparts.
I am absolutely delighted to win this prize! It is a huge testament to the amazing people who I work with every day in my research team, and this is a celebration of all our achievements in this exciting field of chemistry.
Dr Andrew Jupp, School of Chemistry
The method devised by Dr Jupp assesses how the catalyst assembles in solution, and the team showed that varying the ratio of the catalyst components sped up the reactivity. These results will ultimately lead to the design of more efficient sustainable catalysts and support the transition to a greener chemical industry.
Dr Jupp said: “I am absolutely delighted to win this prize! It is a huge testament to the amazing people who I work with every day in my research team, and this is a celebration of all our achievements in this exciting field of chemistry. So I would like to thank all my students, colleagues, collaborators and mentors up to this point, because this wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for every one of them.”
Dr Jupp joined the University of Birmingham in 2020 as a Birmingham Fellow. Prior to this he received his PhD from the University of Oxford and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Toronto and the University of Amsterdam. He has previously won the Early Career Award from the RSC Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms Group, and is a Royal Society University Research Fellow.