Professor Stephen Faulkner
Stephen Faulkner is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He studied Chemistry at the University of Oxford before undertaking doctoral studies with Professor Trevor Powell and Drs Josephine Peach and Andy Pratt Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences. Following an Addison Wheeler Fellowship at Durham (1993-1998), and a lectureship at the University of Surrey (1998-2001), Stephen moved to the University of Manchester in 2001, where he was Professor and Head of Inorganic Chemistry from 2005. He moved to his current post in 2008, and was Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory from 2016-2019.
Stephen’s interests lie in designing and making systems with interesting spectroscopic properties, which can be used to probe interactions in vitro and in vivo, centring on the synthesis and use of metal complexes as imaging and contrast agents, though we have extended our studies to transuranic elements in the nuclear fuel cycle. Key breakthroughs by the group include demonstrating time-gatied luminescence microscopy with lanthanide complexes, characterising near infra-red luminescence from aqueous solutions of lanthanides and actinides, demonstrating solution state upconversion through the lanthanide manifold in thulium complexes, developing methods for exploiting kinetic stability in metal complexes and linking stable complexes to one another and to vectors to yield ratiometric bimetallic probes, exploiting self-assembly in the preparation of complex arrays and demonstrating electrochemical switching of lanthanide luminescence. Stephen was awarded the Corday Morgan Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008, and the RSC Bob Hay Lectureship in 2009.