Andreas Phanopoulos

Andreas grew up on the outskirts of Brussels but spent all his summers in Greece or Cyprus, envious of his older cousins who got to spend their whole year in the sun. He received his MChem in Chemistry from Durham before moving to London to do a PhD at Imperial under Nick Long and Phil Miller, looking at multidentate phosphine ligands and their use as hydrogenation catalysts to make green fuels. He subsequently bounced around having done post-docs for Mark Crimmin at Imperial, Kyoko Nozaki at the University of Tokyo as a JSPS Fellow and for Charlotte Williams at Oxford, before returning to his spiritual home at Imperial, now as a Marie Curie Fellow. Andreas’ research is focused on understanding fundamental reactivity across isolated Cu---Zn bonds to improve CO2-to-methanol catalysis, as well as looking at unusual bonding motifs of zinc hydrides with transition metals. When he’s not in the lab you’ll normally find him (re-)watching Wes Anderson films or playing his guitar and pretending he’s still in a band!