Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff elected as a foreign academician of CAS
19 December 2023
Recently, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced the list of newly elected foreign academicians, and Sir Martyn Poliakoff, Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham, was entitled to this great honour for his extraordinary contribution to China’s scientific development.
In addition to being a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Academia Europaea, Professor Poliakoff is an instructor for the BSc (Hons) Chemistry 2+2 programme at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC). As part of the communications within the University of Nottingham community, he also visits UNNC to give public lectures and discuss the latest research results, sharing his experience with students in Ningbo.
Professor Poliakoff has long been engaged in cross-cutting research in inorganic chemistry, physical chemistry, green chemistry and chemical engineering, and organic chemistry, and has achieved a series of important results in coordination chemistry, supercritical state chemistry, and green technology development. He is one of the key leaders in the field of global green chemistry and has been dedicated to promoting scientific and technological co-operation and exchanges between China and the UK.
In 2020, Professor Poliakoff was granted the 2019 International Science and Technology Cooperation Award – China’s top scientific honour for foreign scientists – and was presented the certificate by President Xi Jinping.
Besides his outstanding academic achievements, Professor Poliakoff has also been an active YouTube Blogger for over 15 years and has over one million followers. In his “Periodic Videos”, he has shared over 700 chemistry-related short videos, such as an introduction to the 118 chemical elements in the periodic table, and interesting little chemistry experiments. The interesting and humorous content of these videos, together with his unique "Einstein-style" hairstyle, have made Professor Poliakoff a success on YouTube and attracted nearly 300 million views.
UNNC aims to bring students a high-quality learning experience and help them unleash their potential. According to the statistics, nearly 90% of the Class of 2022 UNNC undergraduates have entered prestigious universities or enterprises. Among them, graduates of Chemistry have the best performance in further education – all of them went to top 50 universities globally – followed by graduates of Chemical Engineering with a proportion of 92% entering world top 50 universities. Many of them headed to top universities, such as Oxford University, Cambridge University, and Cornell University.