Prof. Christopher Hardacre

Christopher Hardacre is Head of the School of Natural Sciences at University of Manchester. His research group focuses on ionic liquids and catalysis, with projects in environmental and biomass processing, energy, fine chemical synthesis, plasma catalysis for emission control and clean hydrogen production and fundamental aspects of liquid structure. Much of the work has centred around developing new catalytic processes as well as investigating the structure-activity/selectivity relationships using in-situ spectroscopic and structural methods. He has published over 400 papers and nine patents. His work is funded by EPSRC, TSB, Royal Society (RS), industry, local government and European Commission (EC). He was part of the Queen’s University Ionic Liquid Laboratory which attained the Queen’s Award for Further and Higher Education in 2006. Awarded the RSC Teamwork in Innovation (2005), the USA 2008 R and D 100 award and the IChemE Andrew Medal for Catalysis (2013). He is a co-PI and currently Director of the UK Catalysis Hub and an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Chris leads the Pre-treatment and Conversion Topic Group.