William E. Robinson

Bio

If you’d like to know more, here’s my academic life story:

When I started my degree, I was quite interested in artificial photosynthesis. This interest first led me to working in the group of Prof. Julia Weinstein (University of Sheffield) for a year. I spent much of my time focussed on ligand synthesis under the guidance of Dr. Paul Scattergood. We were predominantly interested in how ligand electronic structure would affect the photophysical properties of donor-acceptor Pt(II) complexes, if we could create long-lived charge-separated states, and whether we could get them to anchor on TiO₂ to make dye sensitised solar cells. Being part of Julia’s group meant that I also learned a lot about time-resolved spectroscopy.

After I graduated from Sheffield, I moved to the University of Cambridge to study for my PhD as part of the EPSRC-funded NanoDTC. The first year of this program taught all the materials science, physics, chemistry and even biology surrounding nanotechnology. It was a great way to see a lot of the university, as well as to meet and work with some great scientists and engineers.

I joined Prof. Erwin Reisner’s group for my thesis work where I found my way to enzyme electrochemistry and CO₂reduction. Through this project, I also worked with Prof. Judy Hirst, who taught me a lot. The enzyme was formate dehydrogenase H from E. coli, which, when immobilised on an electrode can both reduce CO₂ to formate, and oxidise formate to CO₂. With my colleagues, we collected quite extensive data on the steady-state and pre-equilibrium behaviour of FDH and used kinetic models to unify and rationalise these data. We made some quite unique data sets, but we’ll see how our conclusions on the mechanism fare…

I spent another postdoctoral year in Erwin’s group in which we developed semi-artificial photosynthetic devices which out-performed natural photosynthesis in a few key ways. In short, they could absorb more wavelengths of light, and transfer electrons from water to protons or CO₂ more efficiently than natural systems. So, artificial photosynthesis: done? Not exactly!

Coming from the solar fuels field, I started to getting used to the idea that mimicking photosynthesis is a rather linear affair. Light comes in, supplies energy to move electrons from water to acceptors like CO₂ or H⁺. That’s hard enough to do with synthetic systems! But really, natural photosynthesis is so successful and interesting because it is a system in which many reaction and energy transfer processes are taking place simultaneously. Can chemistry be performed and studied as a system? This idea led me to work quite extensively in the group of Prof. Wilhelm Huck on prebiotic systems chemistry, with funding from the Simons Foundation’s Collaboration on the Origin of Life. During this period, we did a lot of work in developing the science and methods required for looking at chemical reactions as systems, using the formose reaction as a model system.

In trying to understand systems chemistry, I ended up working with methods which produce a reasonably large amount of complicated reaction data. Perhaps dealing with all of this in the lab, as well as at a computer has led me to my current position as Group Leader in Chemistry and AI in the RobotLab and the Big Chemistry Consortium. Here, I will be furthering my work into complex reaction systems alongside developing a research programme which interfaces chemistry and AI.