Personal Biography

I am a Professor of Nanomaterials at the Department of Materials, Ordinary Fellow of Materials of Corpus at Oxford, and visiting professor at the BioNano Electronics Research Centre at Toyo University, Japan. In 2018, I was elected as one of seven Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission.

I studied chemistry at the University of Ulm, conducted my DPhil under the supervision of Sir Harry Kroto FRS NL and Dr David Walton FRSC and received my DPhil in physical chemistry from the University of Sussex. In 2001, I was awarded the Carbon Pergamon Prize for my thesis on Novel Carbon Nanostructures. Following a one-year post-doc in the same lab and group leader post at the Max-Planck-Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, I was awarded the Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (2002), the Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2006), and the Royal Society Industry Fellowship (2016).

I am a member of the Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and a Founding Member of the Young Academy of Europe - a bottom-up pan-European initiative of outstanding young scientists for networking, scientific exchange and science policy.

Research and Teaching

My research group focuses on the synthesis, processing, and characterisation of novel carbon, boron nitride and other non-carbon based nanomaterials such as nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanofibres, nanorods, 2D nanomaterials, and multifunctional hierarchical nanostructures.

The Nanomaterials by Design research team develops new production processes and uses chemical vapour deposition, template routes, and wet-chemical techniques for the controlled manufacturing of nanomaterials. State-of-the-art in situ characterisation is critically important for elucidating the role of individual growth parameters for the controlled formation and the study of structure properties relationships of these new materials.

Close collaboration with a range of internationally leading industry partners plays a pivotal role for the implementation of tailored nanomaterials in end-user applications in the health-care or energy sectors.

I teach the first year Introduction to Nanomaterials and the third year option course at the Department of Materials. I currently supervise 16 DPhil students, and 3 Part II students. Every summer the Nanomaterials by Design team hosts several summer students.

Recent Publications

Han, Zhao Jun; Huang, Chun; Meysami, Seyyed Shayan; Piche, Dominique; Seo, Dong Han; Pineda, Shafique; Murdock, Adrian T; Bruce, Peter S; Grant, Patrick S; Grobert, Nicole; “High-frequency supercapacitors based on doped carbon nanostructures”, Carbon 2018, 126, 305-312

Qiao, Mo; Meysami, Seyyed Shayan; Ferrero, Guillermo Alvarez; Xie, Fei; Meng, Han; Grobert, Nicole; Titirici, Maria-Magdalena; ““AdvLow Cost Chitosan Derived N Doped Carbons Boost Electrocatalytic Activity of Multiwall Carbon Nanotubes”, Advanced Functional Materials 2018, 28, 16, 1707284

Evers, Koen; Porwal, Harshit; Todd, Richard I; Grobert, Nicole; “MWCNT-coated alumina micro-platelets for nacre-like biomimetic composites”, Carbon 2019, 145, 586-595

Piche, Dominique; Tavernaro, Isabella; Fleddermann, Jana; Lozano, Juan G; Varambhia, Aakash; Maguire, Mahon L; Koch, Marcus; Ukai, Tomofumi; Hernandez Rodriguez, Armando J; Jones, Lewys; “Targeted T 1 Magnetic Resonance Imaging Contrast Enhancement with Extraordinarily Small CoFe2O4 Nanoparticles”, ACS applied materials & interfaces 2019, 21,10, 5331-5334

Velasco, Pablo Quijano; Porfyrakis, Kyriakos; Grobert, Nicole; “The application of the surface energy-based solubility parameter theory for the rational design of polymer-functionalized MWCNTs”, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics 2019, 21, 10, 5331-5334

Xiao, Albert W; Evers, Koen; Tkaczyk, Marzena; Jones, Ruth S; Saxby, Claire; Dragnevski, Kalin; Grobert, Nicole; “Electrophoretic Fabrication of Robust Carbon Nanotube Buckyfilms for Flexible Electronics”, ACS Applied Nano Materials 2019, 2,8, 5190-5199