Dr. Robert James Baker

Dr Bob Baker was born in 1975 in Blaenavon, South Wales. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Warwick and carried out his PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. P. G. Edwards at Cardiff University (1997-2001) on early transition metal triphosphamacrocycles. He then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with Prof. Cameron Jones (2001-2005), working on low oxidation state group 13 compounds. He was then awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship held at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, working with Prof. Dr. Matthias Tamm on substituted cyclohepatrienyl early transition metal complexes. From 2006-2008 he was a Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at Nottingham Trent University, before moving to Trinity College in January 2009. His research interests are in fundamental and applied actinide chemistry and the development of new transition metal complexes for catalysis

  Catalysis   Catalysis/Kinetics   Homogeneous catalysis   Inorganic Chemistry   Lanthanides   Nuclear chemistry   Nuclear/Radioactive Wastes   Organometallic chemistry   Organometallic Chemistry, Main Group   Polymer Chemistry   Polymer technology, biopolymers   Radioactivity   Waste Management

My research focusses on two themes: actinide chemistry, both fundamental and applied to the storage of Spent Nuclear Fuels; non-covalent interactions and their applications to e-waste reclaimation. In actinide chemistry I am internationally recognised and have published 29 papers and gained ca £3m of funding at synchrotrons in UK Switzerland and Germany. Synchrotron time is very competitive, highly prized and gives deeper insights into the chemistry and physics of the actinide compounds. These experiments take ca 1 year from planning to the experiment and data analysis is not trivial with an average lead time of 1.5 years to publication. We are one of a handful of groups worldwide that can do this and have conducted measurements that pushed the capabilities of the synchrotrons beyond the state of the art. We collaborate with multidisciplinary groups from US and Europe and have had several "firsts": the use of emission spectroscopy in U(IV) chemistry that has become a mainstream technique; the use of hard oxophiolic uranyl compounds to catalyse the ring opening of oxygen containing monomer a reaction that should not occur but has led to generalisable mechanistic insights. Funding for this work has been from IRCSET PhD and IRC postdoctoral schemes and I have won EU funding (TALISMAN) and DAAD funding to visit large scale facilities in Germany to conduct transuranium research. Our endeavours in non-covalent interactions has generated 15 papers, two of which were selected to be on the front cover of the Journal. Notably we have explored the weak C-F F-C interactions that have recently become a hot topic in the literature, spurred on by our results, and we have utilised these to extract the Persistent Organic Pollutant Perflourooctanoic acid from water for the first time, and extended to the extraction of important elements from waste electronics. This work has been funded by a PhD studentship from the Environment Protection Agency. In the period 2009-2021 I published 58 peer reviewed paper, averaging 1 publication every 10 weeks.