chemistry

Saiful Islam (chemist)

Saiful Islam (chemist) is a chemistry topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Saiful Islam (chemist) rather than just read about it. In short: Saiful Islam (born 14 August 1963) is a British chemist and professor of materials modelling at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. Saiful is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and received the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Merit Award and Hughes Medal, and the American Chemical Society Award for Energy Chemistry for his major contributions to the fundamental atomistic understanding…

Key takeaways

Saiful Islam (chemist) belongs to chemistry; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Saiful Islam (chemist) to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Saiful Islam (chemist) from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Saiful Islam (born 14 August 1963) is a British chemist and professor of materials modelling at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. Saiful is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and received the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Merit Award and Hughes Medal, and the American Chemical Society Award for Energy Chemistry for his major contributions to the fundamental atomistic understanding of new materials for lithium batteries and perovskite solar cells. Saiful is an atheist who refused the Order of the British Empire citing discomfort with the phrase "British Empire" and its link to colonialism.

Biography

Early life and education Saiful was born in 1963 in Karachi, Pakistan to ethnically Bengali parents. The family moved to London in 1964 and he grew up in Crouch End, north London. There he went to Stationers' Company's School, a state comprehensive. He received both a BSc degree in chemistry and a PhD (1988) from University College London, where he studied under Professor Richard Catlow. Subsequently, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Eastman Kodak laboratories in Rochester, New York, working on oxide superconductors.

Career and research Saiful returned to the UK in 1990 to become a lecturer, then reader, at the University of Surrey. In January 2006 he was appointed professor of Materials Chemistry at the University of Bath. His group applies computational methods combined with structural techniques to study fundamental atomistic properties such as ion conduction, defect chemistry and surface structures. In January 2022, he joined the Department of Materials, University of Oxford as a professor of materials modelling. Saiful has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Materials Chemistry, and sits on the advisory board of the RSC journal Energy and Environmental Science. He is Principal Investigator of the Faraday Institution's 'CATMAT' project on Next-generation Lithium-Ion Cathode Materials.

Outreach and public engagement Saiful presented the 2016 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled "Supercharged: Fuelling the Future" on the theme of energy, a commemorative lecture series for the BBC which celebrated 80 years since the Christmas Lectures were first broadcast on television in 1936. The lectures were broadcast on BBC Four, and achieved over 3.5 million interactions through the BBC broadcasts and social media. Saiful was interviewed before these lectures for articles in The Guardian. A demonstration in these lectures led to a Guinness World Record for the highest voltage (1,275 Volts) produced by a fruit battery using more than 1,000 lemons. Saiful later broke that record in 2021 after using 2,923 lemons to produce 2,307.8 Volts. Saiful has served on the Diversity Committee of the Royal Society, and was selected for the Royal Society's 'Inspiring Scientists' project that recorded the life stories of British scientists with minority ethnic heritage in partnership with National Life Stories at the British Library. His outreach activities include talks on energy materials to student audiences using 3D glasses organised by the TTP Education in Action at the UCL Institute of Education, London. He was interviewed for The Life Scientific programme on BBC Radio 4 in October 2019. On 23 November 2022, Saiful was an invited speaker at the Brian Cox & Robin Ince's Compendium of Reason charity event, which was at the Royal Albert Hall.

Personal life As of 2021, Saiful lives in Bath with his wife, Gita Sunthankar (a local GP), and their two children, Yasmin and Zak. Saiful is an atheist and Patron of Humanists UK.

Awards and honours Saiful is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) since 2008 and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM), as well as Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association. Saiful has received several RSC research awards including 2008 Francis Bacon Medal for Fuel Cell Science, 2011 Materials Chemistry Division Lecturer Award, 2013 Sustainable Energy Award, 2013 Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society, 2017 Peter Day Award for Materials Chemistry, 2020 Storch Award in Energy Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, 2022 Hughes Medal from the Royal society, and the Robert Perrin Award from Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. In 2025, he was awarded Royal Society of Chemistry's Environment, Sustainability and Energy Prize. In 2019, he declined a New Year Honours Award of an Order of the British Empire, because he is "never been comfortable with the words ‘British Empire’ in this award and the links to empire, colonialism, and slavery".

References

External links Media related to Saiful Islam at Wikimedia Commons

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Saiful Islam (chemist)

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Saiful Islam (chemist) claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In chemistry, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Saiful Islam (chemist) before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Saiful Islam (chemist) ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Saiful Islam (chemist)

In research: Saiful Islam (chemist) appears in chemistry research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Saiful Islam (chemist) in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Saiful Islam (chemist) is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1963 births, 20th-century British chemists, 21st-century British chemists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Saiful Islam (chemist) outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Saiful Islam (chemist) in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Saiful Islam (chemist) means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Saiful Islam (chemist) out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Saiful Islam (chemist) in simple terms?

Why does Saiful Islam (chemist) matter?

Because it connects several chemistry ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Saiful Islam (chemist)?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Saiful Islam (chemist).