Professor, KAUST
Martin Heeney is a Professor of Chemical Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). He is a graduate of the University of East Anglia and received his PhD from the same institution in 1999 under the supervision of Prof. Michael Cook. Following eight years in industry, he joined the Materials Department at Queen Mary University of London as a senior lecturer in 2007 before moving to Imperial College in 2009 and KAUST in 2022. His research interests include the design, synthesis and characterisation of solution processed materials for a variety of applications. He has published over 300 research papers, 5 book chapters and over 100 patents. He has been named five times by Thomson Reuters as a HighlyCited researcher in the field of Materials Science, is a recipient of the RSC Corday-Morgan (2013) medal, the RSC Peter Day (2020) award and the Macro group UK medal (2020).
Tuning the Performance of Conjugated Polymers by Post-polymerisation Modification.
Controlling the band gap, molecular packing and absolute energy levels of conjugated polymers and oligomers is fundamentally important for their utilisation in a number of applications. Most approaches utilize the co-polymerisation of various co-monomer materials for this goal. However establishing structure-property relationships by varying co-monomer ratio can be challenging, as it is difficult to disentangle the influence of changes in the backbone chemistry from variations in the molecular weight, end-groups and polydispersity. Here I will discuss alternate approaches based on the functionalisation of pre-formed conjugated polymers, enabling the synthesis of libraries with consistent dispersity and length. I will highlight how such approaches can be utilised to carefully tune hydrophilicity, control electron affinity, balance ion penetration versus swelling behaviour or introduce stimuli responsive behaviour.
Professor, KAUST