Since Shuang Li started as a BIG-NSE scholarship holder in 2015, she has had a stellar career: She has been working in the Functional Materials group of Prof. Arne Thomas at the TU Berlin, where she successfully completed her doctoral thesis in 2019. After a rather short period as a postdoc researcher in the same group, she became group leader in UniSysCat in autumn 2021. Recently, she obtained a professorship at the College of Polymer Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. With this step, Shuang Li is now leaving UniSysCat. We congratulate her on her new position and wish her all the best for the future!
Shuang Li‘s research focuses on the design and synthesis of novel hybrid materials and their applications as advanced catalytic materials. In her new group at Sichuan University which she named “Hybrid and Catalytic Materials“, she wants to focus on polymer-based hybrid catalysts for hydrogen production (water splitting, seawater splitting, waste polymer reconstruction), polysulfide conversion in Li-Sulfur batteries and CO2 hydrogenation.
Her research is still strongly related to what she did in UniSysCat where she had been working on metal-organic precursor design and applications in electrocatalytic water splitting. Her new group will continue the work in this very interesting area, and extend it to other applications such as waste polymer reconstruction catalysis, polysulfide conversion catalysis, and CO2 hydrogenation catalysis.
„We believe that catalysis is and will always be one of the most important sciences in the world. We want to make the catalysts better, and we believe the catalysts will make the world better. I was very lucky to be one of the researchers working on catalyst design.“ as Shuang Li says.
Shuang Li’s professor position is funded by the Chinese “Excellent Young Scientists Fund Program (Overseas)” from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The fund supports young - under the age of 38 (for male) or 40 (for female) - scholars from China with good achievements in basic research to conduct innovative research in areas of their own choice. Sichuan University is one of China's top universities, attached to the Ministry of Education.