Professor Iain McCulloch FRS
Fellow & Tutor in Chemistry
Professor of Polymer Materials
Education
BSc PhD (Strathclyde)
I began my career after graduating with a PhD in Polymer Chemistry from the University of Strathclyde at Hoechst Celanese Corporation in New Jersey, USA where I designed, developed and commercialized functional polymers for a range of optical, electronic, and drug-delivery applications, including a water-based antireflective polymer system for photoresist processes with AZ Clariant. I then moved to ISP Corporation in New Jersey to manage the polymer physics research group, working on developing methodology for rheological surface science and electronic products.
In 2000, I returned to the UK as a research manager at Merck Chemicals in Southampton, where I was responsible for developing semiconducting polymers for organic electronic and solar-cell applications. A key aspect of this research was the exploitation of molecular alignment and organization of semiconducting polymers and small molecules in the liquid crystalline phase. At Merck, my group discovered a liquid crystalline thiophene polymer, pBTTT, which subsequently underpinned many research advances in charge transport of organic thin films since its publication in Nature Materials in 2006, which garnered the distinction of one of the top ten most influential papers published in the first five years of publication of the journal.
In 2007, I joined the faculty at Imperial College London to continue research in organic semiconductor materials. At this time, along with colleague Professor Martin Heeney, I cofounded the specialty chemical company Flexink Ltd, supplying a range of electronic materials to leading manufacturers across the world. At Imperial, I continued to explore new chemistries for organic solar cells and transistors, developing the polymer IDTBT, which exhibits disorder free transport, and an early non-fullerene electron acceptor for solar cells, IDTBR.
I joined KAUST, Saudi Arabia, in 2014 and became Director of the KAUST Solar Center in 2016. This work developing new solar cell materials led to the discovery that a ternary materials blend, with two non-fullerene acceptors, could outperform the equivalent binary devices, leading to high power conversion efficiencies, that helped towards a resurgence in the field. I joined the University of Oxford in 2020, where I continue a range of research activities in the development of organic semiconductors for thin-film transistors, photovoltaics, photodetectors, photocatalysis and bioelectronics.
My research has focussed on using chemical molecular design and synthesis to create new organic materials capable of enabling new applications in optics, electronics and sensors. These materials have specific functionality which can facilitate for example, light absorption to enable new flexible solar cells, detection of metabolites for bioelectronic sensors, electron conduction for transistors, and more recently, enhanced hydrogen production from photochemical catalysis of water.