Teaching

My teaching interests are in Inorganic and Solid State Chemistry.

Sihai Yang received his BSc in Chemistry from Peking University (2007) and PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Nottingham (2010). He has been awarded the Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Award in 2007, the EPSRC PhD Plus Fellowship in 2011, the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship in 2011, and the Nottingham Research Fellowship in 2013. In 2015, he moved to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester and currently holds a Chair in Inorganic Chemistry. His academic awards include the Diamond Young Investigator Award (2011), the Honourable Mention Award of International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) Prize for Young Chemists (2012), the Institute of Physics B T M Willis Prize (2013), the ISIS Neutron & Muon Source Impact Awards (2019), the CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists (2019), and the RSC Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize (2020).

We develop porous materials for applications in clean-air technology, catalysis, biomass conversion, energy storage, separation and conductivity. We study a wide range of porous solids based upon metal-organic frameworks, zeolites, and inorganic materials. Our key research interest is to investigate the host-guest chemical processes underpinning their materials property using state-of-the-art structural and dynamic studies by synchrotron X-ray diffraction, spectroscopy and neutron scattering, combined with modelling. 

Porous materials containing nanosized cavities (1-20 nm), the walls of which are decorated with designed active sites, can form unique functional platforms to study and re-define the chemistry and reactivity of small molecules within the confined space. Research in our group involves design, synthesis and characterisation of the materials, and particularly the structural and dynamic studies at National Facilities to understand their materials function at a molecular level. Recent finding includes the discovery of catalytic origins for a range of important catalytic reactions, and a series of new metal-organic frameworks showing properties for the clean-up of air pollutants, such as SO₂, NO_x and NH₃.