Prof. David A. Leigh from University of Manchester visited Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter (FJIRSM) on July 19th, 2019. While staying at FJIRSM, Prof. Leigh delivered a lecture entitled “Making the Tiniest Machines”. Detailed discussion was carried out with the researchers and students at FJIRSM.  

Prof. David A. Leigh received his B.Sc. (1984) and Ph. D. (1987) from the University of Sheffield in UK. He became a postdoctoral research associate in National Research Council of Canada in 1987. He was employed by University of Manchester, University of Warwick and University of Edinburgh from 1989 to 2012. He was promoted to be a professor at the University of Manchester in 2012. Leigh group’s interests are in the interface between chemistry and nanotechnology. For the past 20 years they have been at the forefront of the development of synthetic molecular machine systems and molecular robotics. More than one-in-six (46 primary research papers) of 271 publications have been cited more than 100 times each; three particularly highly-cited papers more than 500 times each. The total number of citations exceeded 17,000, and the H factor was 77. Prof. Leigh has won many important international awards, including Royal Society of Chemistry Award for Interdisciplinary Research (2004), Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (2005), Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (2007), International Izatt-Christensen Award for Macrocyclic Chemistry (2007), EU Descartes Prize for Research (2007), Royal Society of Chemistry Merck Award for Organic Chemistry (2009), Royal Society of Chemistry Tilden Prize (2010), and Royal Society of Chemistry Pedler Award (2014) etc.