Sustainable Chemical Innovations Enabling Net Carbon Emissions (SCIENCE): Fully funded PhD studentship, School of Chemistry, University of Nottingham

A PhD studentship working with Dr Anabel Lanterna is available for a 2023 start as part of a major collaboration with Lubrizol.

The project will develop a culture of embedding sustainability in chemicals and polymer manufacturing from the earliest stages of design through to industrial production and use. Focussed on enabling sustainable routes to industrially important molecules, the studentship will be largely based around developing an environmentally sustainable method for isomerisations and hydrogenations using less energy-demanding catalysts (heterogeneous photocatalysts) while removing the need for high pressure hydrogen. The project will harness sunlight for chemical manufacturing to enable (i) reactions under mild conditions (room temperature, atmospheric pressure); (ii) the use of renewable feedstocks and/or reagents, and (iii) minimising the use of fossil energy.