Professor Stephen Liddle

Winner: 2020 Tilden Prize

University of Manchester

For extensive contributions to understanding the inorganic and organometallic chemistry of the f elements.

Celebrate Professor Stephen Liddle

#RSCAwards

I vividly remember being shown beautiful blue crystals of a copper salt not long after going to secondary school and that had me hooked on chemistry right there and then.

Despite the fact we have had nuclear technologies for decades, we still know remarkably little about the basic chemistry and properties of actinide elements like uranium.

It is therefore essential that we understand the chemistry of uranium in greater detail, but historically investigations have been limited.

Professor Liddle’s research seeks to make uranium molecules under unusual conditions that prevent the element from staying in its ‘comfort-zone’ as it does in more routine studies. By doing this we can access the ‘hidden’ face of uranium and so learn how it interacts with elements from around the periodic table.

This could – and does – uncover new types of chemical bonding, reactivity, and novel magnetic phenomena, which broadens our knowledge and understanding. This improved platform of knowledge could ultimately help inspire new approaches to nuclear waste clean-up.

Read full biography

Steve Liddle is Professor and Head of Inorganic Chemistry and co-Director of the Centre for Radiochemistry Research at The University of Manchester. He was born in Sunderland in the North East of England and obtained his BSc (Hons) and PhD degrees from Newcastle University. After postdoctoral stints at Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Nottingham Universities, he took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2007–2015) with a proleptic Lectureship and was promoted to Associate Professor and Reader in 2010 and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in 2013. He moved to The University of Manchester in 2015.

Professor Liddle was elected a Fellow of the 新月直播app下载 in 2011 and Vice President to the Executive Committee of the European Rare Earth and Actinide Society in 2012 and continues to serve in this role. He was Chairman of COST Action CM1006, a 22-country network for f-block chemistry (2011–2015). He was awarded the RSC Sir Edward Frankland Fellowship and Radiochemistry Group Bill Newton Awards in 2011, and in 2014 he was a recipient of a Rising Star Award at the 41st International Conference on Coordination Chemistry. He was awarded the RSC Corday-Morgan prize in 2015 and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award in 2019.

Professor Liddle has been a recipient of European Research Council Starter and Consolidator Grants, and he currently holds an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship. His research interests focus on early metal coordination and organometallic chemistry, with a particular emphasis on the actinide, and he has published around 200 research articles, reviews and book chapters.

Q+A

How did you first become interested in chemistry?

I’ve been exceptionally fortunate to have dedicated and inspiring teachers both at secondary school and A-level college. I vividly remember being shown beautiful blue crystals of a copper salt not long after going to secondary school and that had me hooked on chemistry right there and then.

What is your favourite element?

Oh, that’s easy! Uranium…

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