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About Professor Thomas Maschmeyer

Professor Maschmeyer’s work is focused on the quest to create a more sustainable world through advanced catalytic technology. He has made many break-through discoveries in the design of catalytically active sites and has been involved in moving many technologies from the laboratory into real-world applications via established sponsor or new start-up companies.

The main driver for research was (and is) the intellectual excitement derived by, effectively, working out how the world works, how to use this understanding to create new compounds/materials and using these to generate solutions to real-life problems, in particular those connected to sustainability. Professor Maschmeyer is what is traditionally described in Continental Europe as a Technical Chemist, sitting somewhere between pure chemistry and chemical engineering. Success is measured both by fundamental breakthroughs and by industrial application, i.e. the achievement would be far from complete without, for some of the work, a demonstrated degree of technology translation into society at large. Currently, his three main areas of activity relate to (a) the generation of hydrogen from water using sunlight – providing potentially a limitless clean and carbon-free source of energy to the world, addressing inherently climate change (no CO2), fresh water supply (desalination) and agricultural production (non-fossil derived ammonia), (b) the conversion of brown-coal into a liquid fuel that can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of powerstations by up to 50%, (c) the production of third generation biofuels and chemicals from fibrous green waste, providing three separate product streams: high value C5 sugars and their derivatives, gasoline octane boosters and ethanol.

The supervisor, currently Federation Fellow and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, has a strong track record of scientific leadership, which has most recently (2006/7) been recognised by the award of the Australian Academy of Science Prize to the leading Australian chemist under 40 years of age.
       He is a frequent plenary and keynote speaker at major international conferences. The demand for his leadership is expressed by his positions on many international editorial boards and learned academic societies. His advice and insight are sought by industry and governments around the world.
       At the age of 31, three and a half years after receiving his doctorate, he took up the position of Chair of Industrial Organic Chemistry and Head of Department of Applied Organic and Catalytic Chemistry at the TU Delft, which is among the premier European universities of applied science and technology. His advances in building the institution’s research capacity in these fields led to his promotion, in 2000, to Vice-Chairman (Deputy Dean) of the Institute for Chemical Technology.
       Since returning to Australia just under five years ago as Federation Fellow, Maschmeyer has secured more than $9M in research funding from the ARC, federal and state governments, and industry. He has built up a group of between 15-20 people.
       Through his intellectual leadership, talent for the highly productive mentoring of younger scientists, and his ability to foster collaborations with other international research groups (e.g. Cambridge, Delft, Venice) and with industry (e.g. Shell, ABB Lummus, ABG, Ignite, Licella), he has been able to establish a track record that can proudly state that all of his students or postdocs overseas and here always found employment before their position within the group had finished – may of them in prestigious positions.
       Professor Maschmeyer received his BSc (Hons I) and PhD from the University of Sydney in 1991 and 1995, respectively. In 1994, he moved to work with Professor Sir John M. Thomas at the Royal Institution of Great Britain as Australian Bicentennial Fellow. In 1996, he became the Assistant Director of the Davy Faraday Laboratories and Affiliate Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Two years later, he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Applied Organic and Catalytic Chemistry at the Delft ICT, where he became Vice-Chairman in 2000. That year he also played a leading role in spinning out a combinatorial catalysis company, Avantium, with a current capitalisation of A$110M and a workforce of 90+; in December 2005, he provided major technical and strategic advice for the listing of the Australian Biodiesel Group (A$120M) at the ASX of which has has been elected non-executive director in May 2008.
       The international standing of his research has been recognised in the award of a Research Fellowship of the Royal Society (Oxford), an EC Fellowship, an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Australian Bicentennial Fellowship.  He was a Scientific Advisor to the Dutch Ministry of Finance, Guest-Editor of Topics in Catalysis, and has served on the boards of many leading journals, societies, companies, government organisations and international conferences. In 2004, he received a Tall Poppy Award from the Australian Institute of Political Science for his outstanding research.
       13 years after PhD completion, about 190 items have been/are being published, including 17 patents and 15 book chapters, resulting in an H-Index of 29, with an average citation rating of 24 per paper, and an m value of 2.2.

Scholarships are available to high quality students. Most local students in the laboratory are supported by an Australian or University Postgraduate Award and International students by other scholarships.  Please contact me for further details.

Selected publications

  1. Th. Maschmeyer, F. Rey, G. Sankar and J.M. Thomas, Heterogeneous catalysts obtained by grafting metallocene complexes onto mesoporous silica, Nature 378, 159–62, 1995. ESTABLISHED THE CONCEPT OF SINGLE SITE GRAFTING AND THE NATURE OF THE ACTIVE SITE – CITED C. 600 TIMES.
  2. D.S. Shephard, Th. Maschmeyer, B.F.G. Johnson, J.M. Thomas, G. Sankar, D. Ozkaya, W. Zhou, R.D. Oldroyd and R.G. Bell, Bimetallic Nanoparticle catalysts anchored inside mesoporous silica, Angewandte Chemie, IEE. 36(20), 2242–45, 1997. CREATED THE CONCEPT OF THE ‘DENUDED CARBONYL CLUSTER’, ALLOWING THE PRECISE DESIGN OF CATALYTIC SUPPORTED METALLIC NANOCLUSTERS.
  3. W. Zhou, J.M. Thomas, B.F.G. Johnson, D. Ozkaya, Th. Maschmeyer, R.G. Bell, Q. Ge, Ordering of ruthenium cluster carbonyls in mesoporous silica, Science 280(5364), 705–08, 1998.  REVEALED THE ABAB ORDERING OF ‘DENUDED CLUSTERS’ ACROSS INDEPENDENT SILICA CHANNELS, WHICH HAS LED TO QUANTUM DOT AND QUANTUM TRANSISTOR DEVELOPMENTS.
  4. M. Nowotny, Th. Maschmeyer, B.F.G. Johnson, P. Lahuerta, J.M. Thomas and J.E. Davies, Heterogeneous dinuclear rhodium(II) hydroformylation catalysts – performance evaluation and silsesquioxane-based chemical modeling, Angewandte Chemie, IEE. 40(5), 955–58, 2001.  RESOLVED A LONG-STANDING DEBATE ON THE ACTIVE SITE STRUCTURE OF A WELL-KNOWN CATALYST.
  5. P.P. Pescarmona, J.C. Van der Waal, I.E. Maxwell and Th. Maschmeyer, A new efficient route to titanium-silsesquioxane epoxidation catalysts developed using high-speed experimentation techniques, Angewandte Chemie, IEE. 40(4), 740–43, 2001.  NOVEL COMBINATION OF ‘DARWINIAN’ EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN AND HIGH-SPEED EXPERIMENTATION.
  6. Z. Shan, E. Gianotti, J.C. Jansen, J.A. Peters, L. Marchese and Th. Maschmeyer, One-step synthesis of a highly active mesoporous titanium-containing silica by using bifunctional templating, Chemistry – A European Journal 7(7), 1437–43, 2001.  UNAMBIGUOUS CONFIRMATION OF THE FORMATION MECHANISM OF A NEW, IMPORTANT MESOPOROUS MATERIAL BY FOLLOWING A ‘TRACER’ IN-SITU DURING SYNTHESIS.
  7. FRONT PAGE: Waller, P., Shan, Z., Marchese, L., Tartaglione, G., Zhou, W., Jansen, J.C. & Maschmeyer, T., Zeolite nanocrystals inside mesoporous TUD-1: a high-performance catalytic composite, Chemistry – A European Journal 10(20), 4970–76, 2004.  HIGH-PROFILE DEMONSTRATION OF A NEW CONCEPT FOR HIERARCHICAL DESIGN AND ITS CATALYTIC BENEFITS.
  8. Srokol, Z., Bouche, A.G., van Estrik, A., Strik, R.C.J., Maschmeyer, T. & Peters, J.A. Hydrothermal upgrading of biomass to biofuel; studies on some monosaccharide model compounds. Carbohydrate Research 339, 1717–26 , 2004.  DELINEATED THE UNDERLYING REACTION MECHANISM OF A BIOMASS MODEL COMPOUND.
  9. Zwijnenburg, M.A., Bromley, S.T., Foster, M.D., Bell, R.G., Delgado-Friedrichs, O., Jansen, J. C. & Maschmeyer, T. Toward understanding the thermodynamic viability of zeolites and related frameworks through a simple topological model. Chemistry of Materials 16, 3809–20 , 2004.  A HIGHLY UNUSUAL AND INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING ZEOLITE FRAMEWORKS.
  10. Van de Water, L.G.A., Kaza, A., Beattie, J.K., Masters, A.F., Maschmeyer, T., Partial oxidation of 4-tert-butyltoluene catalyzed by homogeneous cobalt and cerium acetate catalysts in the Br-/H2O2/acetic acid system: insights into selectivity and mechanism, Chemistry - A European Journal, 13(28), 8037–44, 2007.  DISCOVERED A NEW MECHANISM TO ILLUMINATE AN OLD REACTION – IDENTIFYING THE KEY INTERMEDIATE.