Burton Lecture 2025: Professor Charlotte Williams OBE FRS
New Hunt’s House, Guy’s Campus, London
Professor Charlotte Williams OBE FRS, University of Oxford, will explore how polymers can be redesigned to tackle sustainability challenges and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The lecture will showcase recent research on developing polymerisations from renewable resources and will be followed by a drinks reception.
Designing sustainable polymers: Activating renewable resources to make better materials through to end-life recycling
We need to redesign polymers to try to tackle sustainability concerns and also reduce the greenhouse gas emissions prevalent through their life cycle. The lecture will describe recent research from Professor Williams' team in the development of polymerisations using renewable resources such as carbon dioxide and biomass. It will focus on how to improve the activity and selectivity of catalysts, using kinetic, spectroscopic and computational methods to investigate the polymerisation mechanisms. The resulting oxygenated polymers can be tailored to show different properties and case studies will focus on improving the properties of plastics, elastics and adhesives. The lecture will also explore the end-life recycling of the polymers through both reprocessing and catalysed depolymerisations.
Speaker bio
Charlotte Williams is the statutory Chair in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in polymerisation catalysis, inorganic and polymer chemistry. She is particularly focussed on carbon dioxide utilisation by copolymerisation and on the production of bio-derived polyesters, polycarbonates and block polymers.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her work has been recently recognised by the Leverhulme Medal of the Royal Society (2022), The Royal Society of Chemistry Tilden Medal (2021), an OBE for Services to Chemistry (2020), Macro Group UK Medal (2019), DeChema Otto Roelen Catalysis Medal (2018), The UK Catalysis Hub Sir John Meurig Thomas Medal (2017) and the Royal Society of Chemistry Corday Morgan Medal (2016).
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