A Time of Change

Abstract

Fresh faces: Read Editor-in-Chief Claire M. Cobley's editorial to find out more about our new board members, the 2023 Ryoji Noyori ACES Award winner, and new ACES early career awards. The beginning of a new year is always a time of change, and this year even more so than most at ChemNanoMat. After eight years of service, two founding co-chairs of the Editorial Board, Susumu Kitagawa, Kyoto University, Japan, and Huisheng Peng, Fudan University, China, will be stepping down from their roles this year. They have given excellent guidance to the journal from before the first papers were even published and were central to the journal's successful launch in 2015. We would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to them both for their numerous contributions! Thankfully they are not going far, and will continue to stay connected to the journal through roles on the International Advisory Board. This year we also say goodbye to many of our other founding board members. Their connections to the scientific community have been crucial in putting ChemNanoMat on the map and helping us turn the idea of a nanoscience journal rooted in Asia into a reality. The team would like to say a big thank you to all of them for everything they have done for the journal over the years. Although we are sad to say goodbye to old friends, we are also excited to announce that many fresh faces are joining ChemNanoMat’s editorial and advisory boards in 2023. Pooi See Lee, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, will be joining Hua Zhang, City University of Hong Kong, as a co-chair of the Editorial Board starting this year. She was among the first authors to publish in ChemNanoMat after the journal's 2015 launch, and we are delighted to have her bring her deep expertise in nanomaterials for energy and electronics applications to the co-chair role. You can find the biographies of Pooi See Lee and the rest of our new Editorial Board members at the end of this editorial. We look forward to working with all of them to further grow and develop ChemNanoMat in the years to come. I would also like to take a moment to share two important pieces of news from the Asian Chemical Editorial Society (ACES), the collaboration of 12 chemical societies across Asia and the Pacific that co-own ChemNanoMat. First of all, we are delighted to announce that Keiji Maruoka, Kyoto University, Japan, will be the recipient of the 2023 Ryoji Noyori ACES Award. This award is given every two years to a field-leading chemist in honor of Ryoji Noyori's key role in the founding of ACES and launch of the first ACES journal, Chemistry – An Asian Journal. We are currently planning an award symposium to celebrate Professor Maruoka's award at the IUPAC-CHAINS meeting in The Hague, The Netherlands, in August of this year. We hope you will join us there! Second, ACES has recently launched a new award series designed to highlight the achievements of early career scientists. These awards are given by individual society partners on behalf of ACES and include both an invitation to speak at a national meeting and an invitation to submit an article to one of the three ACES journals: Chemistry – An Asian Journal, the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry, and ChemNanoMat. We look forward to publishing the work of many award winners in the future! It has been a pleasure to work with all of you over the past year. Here's to another great year and many more fruitful collaborations! Dr. Claire M. Cobley Editor-in-Chief ChemNanoMat Pooi See Lee received her Ph.D. degree from the National University of Singapore in 2002. She joined Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd (now Globalfoundries) in the research and technology development department from 2002–2003. She is a recipient of the 2001 Norman Hackerman Young Author award presented by the Electrochemical Society, USA. In January 2004, she joined the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University as an Assistant Professor. She was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2009. In Sept 2015, she was promoted to Full Professor. Pooi See has authored and co-authored many publications in the field of nanomaterials for energy and electronics applications. She is interested in synthesizing innovative nanomaterials and harnessing their multi-functionality through understanding the structure-property characteristics. She has developed high energy capacitors, energy saving electrochromic coatings, novel transparent conductors, flexible and stretchable devices. She is keen on advancing the frontier of green nanotechnology and to translate research outcomes into real solutions. She was elected as the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow in 2020, the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors. Rona Chandrawati is a Scientia Associate Professor and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow in the School of Chemical Engineering at The University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), Australia. She obtained her Ph.D. from The University of Melbourne in 2012 and was then a Marie Curie Fellow at Imperial College London before returning to Australia as a Lecturer (2015–2017), Scientia Senior Lecturer (2018–2020), and Scientia Associate Professor (2021-present). Her research group focuses on developing enzyme-like catalysts for drug delivery and designing polymer-based nanomaterials for sensors in food safety and health monitoring. Hyunjoo Lee received her B.S. and M.S. degree from Seoul National University, South Korea and Ph.D. degree from California Institute of Technology, USA. She is currently a full professor at KAIST. Her research interests include heterogeneous atomic catalysts with structure control and their applications for various gas-phase and electrochemical reactions. Yan Lu received her Ph.D. in macromolecular chemistry in 2005 at the Dresden University of Technology, Germany. After that, she worked first as postdoctoral researcher and then as a research scientist at the University of Bayreuth. In 2009, she joined the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB) as a group leader in Colloid Chemistry. Since 2017, she is a professor in the Institute of Chemistry at the University of Potsdam. She is now the head of the Department for Electrochemical Energy Storage at HZB. Her research focuses on design and synthesis of colloidal particles with tailored mesoscopic structures and their application as energy storage materials, catalysts and sensors. Pramod Pillai obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala, India, followed by a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Cochin University of Science & Technology, in Kerala, India (work done at National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (NIIST), Trivandrum, India). His Ph.D. research was on the optical properties of hybrid nanomaterials, in the group of Prof. K. George Thomas. After graduation, he worked as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, in the group of Prof. Christof M. Niemeyer. This was followed by a second postdoctoral stay at Northwestern University in Evanston, U.S.A., in the group of Prof. Bartosz A. Grzybowski. During his postdoctoral research, he worked on interdisciplinary areas in nanoscience including nanoelectronics and nanobiotechnology. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, India. His research at IISER Pune is focused on the interplay of forces to control the light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. Some of the properties of interest include (photo)catalysis, trivial & non-trivial photophysics, and self-assembly in hybrid nanomaterials. Bing Xu, after receiving his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Nanjing University in 1987 and 1990, respectively, obtained his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Pennsylvania. Before starting his independent research at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2000, he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Xu was a tenured professor at HKUST until Jul. 2008 before he returned to Boston. He currently is a professor in the Department of Chemistry, Brandeis University. He has made pioneering contributions to metallogels, multifunctional magnetic nanoparticles, self-delivery drugs, supramolecular hydrogels, and enzyme-instructed self-assembly for in-situ anticancer nanomedicine. His current research focuses on the applications of enzymatic noncovalent synthesis in materials, biology, and medicine. Nobuhiro Yanai is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Chemistry at Kyushu University, Japan. He earned his Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 2011 under Prof. Susumu Kitagawa and Prof. Takashi Uemura on guest properties in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)/porous coordination polymers (PCPs). He was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Steve Granick at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, experiencing colloid and soft matter sciences. He joined Kyushu University in 2012. He is currently leading a group that creates photo-functional materials, working on photon upconversion, dynamic nuclear polarization, and quantum materials. He received several awards including The Wiley Young Researcher Award, The APA (Asian and Oceanian Photochemistry Association) Prize for Young Scientists, and Award for Young Chemists, Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ). Qihua Yang received her Ph.D. degree in Inorganic Chemistry from Northeast Normal University. She did postdoctoral research in State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP, China), LCOMS-CNRS/CPE (France), and Toyota Central R&D Labs. Inc. (Japan). She joint DICP as a full professor in 2003 and moved to Zhejiang Normal University in 2022. Her research interests are mainly focused on the synthesis of hybrid porous materials for heterogeneous asymmetric catalysis and nano-catalysis. She is the author or co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications.