On celebrating his inaugural lecture entitled In my element: adventures in silicon chemistry

Professor Lickiss is an element chemist, best known for his work on silicon compounds and is Professor of Organometallic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London. He obtained both his BSc (1980) and DPhil. (1983) from the University of Sussex, where his DPhil. was supervised by Professor C. Eaborn, FRS. He left Sussex to work as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor A. G. Brook in Toronto where he prepared some of the first compounds to contain silicon to carbon double bonds. He returned to Sussex and was awarded one of the newly set up Royal Society 1983 University Research Fellowships. He resigned this Fellowship in 1989 to take up a lectureship at the University of Salford where he stayed for four years before moving to Imperial.

Last night Professor Lickiss presented his inaugural lecture to a packed audience with his informative and entertaining talk In my element: adventures in silicon chemistry.

During the talk Paul took the audience on a journey through silicon life, and organic-silicon compounds for green energy storage explaining how as the second most common element in the Earth's crust, silicon is in everything from sand to windows, and from deodorants to the devices we read on.

Paul explained how silicon is a periodic table neighbour to carbon with some similar properties, and how this close relationship to carbon has led to many studies investigating the possibilities of replacing carbon with silicon in drugs, polymers, and solvents. Current studies are investigating the potential for inserting silicon into organic molecules to make tailored, porous 3D frameworks to store hydrogen as a green fuel or to capture carbon dioxide.

The talk is now available to be viewed on online for anyone who missed the lecture or would like to see it again.