The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Shauhrat S. Chopra
Environmental sustainability of digestate-derived Rhamnolipids: Life cycle assessment approach
Chopra leads data-driven research on the sustainability and resilience of engineered systems at City University of Hong Kong. With collaborators at the University of Guelph, he applied life cycle assessment to rhamnolipid biosurfactants derived from food-waste digestate, quantifying the environmental case for circular bioprocessing routes that valorise organic waste into higher-value chemical products.
Mingzi Sun
Balancing the global nitrogen cycle means finding better ways to convert nitrate back into ammonia, particularly in neutral solutions where performance has lagged. Using a one-pot synthesis, the team produced ultrathin nanosheet-assembled ruthenium and iron nanoflowers with low-coordinated ruthenium sites, reaching 92.9 per cent faradaic efficiency for ammonia, with experiment and theory pointing to an increased d-band centre.
Teng Zhou
Energy Applications of Ionic Liquids: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Ionic liquids, salts made entirely of ions with fascinating and tunable properties, are finding uses across the energy landscape, from battery electrolytes and heat transfer fluids to carbon dioxide capture, biofuel extraction and high-energy propellants. The work provides an extensive overview of these applications, sets out the fundamentals, and weighs the current challenges and emerging opportunities in each area.
Pedro Castano
Castano leads the Multiscale Reaction Engineering group at KAUST, integrating experimental and computational methods across catalysis and reactor engineering. In this multi-institution study with partners including Wageningen University and the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, his team engineered iron sites in ZSM-5 zeolites to enable efficient, selective oxidation of methane into valuable chemicals.
Zhichuan J. Xu
Spin-related Cu-Co pair to increase electrochemical ammonia generation on high-entropy oxides
Turning nitrate pollution in water into useful ammonia depends on the fine detail of the catalyst surface. Working with a high-entropy oxide containing magnesium, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc, the team show that the spin state of cobalt governs the copper and cobalt synergy: high spin cobalt assists ammonia generation, while low spin cobalt weakens the effect.
Jinlong Gong
Propane dehydrogenation: catalyst development, new chemistry, and emerging technologies
Propylene underpins products from polypropylene to acrylonitrile, and making it directly from propane has become an industrial route of growing interest. This review covers recent advances in propane dehydrogenation, including catalyst development, the active sites and reaction pathways over metals and metal oxides, and the deactivation mechanisms that limit how long a catalyst lasts.
Zhongxin Chen
Most work on making ammonia electrochemically from nitrate targets the dilute levels found in wastewater, leaving the concentrated nitrate in nuclear and fertiliser wastes unexplored. Here a ruthenium and copper oxide cocatalyst system runs at 10 amps in one molar nitrate in a flow electrolyser with full faradaic efficiency towards ammonia, with the mechanism probed by deuterium labelling and operando infrared spectroscopy.
Marc-Olivier Coppens
A nature-inspired solution for water management in flow fields for electrochemical devices
Coppens pioneered nature-inspired chemical engineering at UCL, translating mechanisms found in biological systems into scalable process designs. Working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin on neutron imaging, his team developed a lung-inspired flow-field design that improves water management in fuel cells and electrolysers, pointing to more efficient electrochemical devices for the energy transition.
Xuping Sun
Advances in ammonia electrosynthesis from ambient nitrate/nitrite reduction
Ambient electrosynthesis offers a different route to ammonia, and this review gathers recent advances in producing it by reducing nitrate and nitrite. Rather than reporting a single experiment, the work maps where progress has been made across the field and what the emerging approaches to this conversion have in common.
Minhua Shao
Electrocatalytic Reduction of Nitrate to Ammonia on Low-Cost Ultrathin CoOx Nanosheets
Ammonia is normally made under harsh conditions, which makes an electrochemical route from nitrate at ambient conditions appealing. This study designs low-cost ultrathin cobalt oxide nanosheets rich in surface oxygen, reporting a high ammonia yield with faradaic efficiency above 90 per cent, and calculations indicating that surface oxygen suppresses the competing hydrogen evolution reaction.
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The Subject Awards are open to partner universities.
Partners verify their data, feature their academics, and are eligible for the Subject Awards. Finalists are identified from open data; winners are decided by our editorial team and announced on 15 September 2026.
Explore partnership →The wider slate
Fifteen more candidate partnerships behind the finalists.
Pulsed electroreduction of low-concentration nitrate to ammonia
Propane dehydrogenation: catalyst development, new chemistry, and emerging technologies
Self-assembled iron-containing mordenite monolith for carbon dioxide sieving
Advances in ammonia electrosynthesis from ambient nitrate/nitrite reduction
Sulfur vacancy-rich MoS2 as a catalyst for the hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol
A critical review on the use of potentiometric based biosensors for biomarkers detection
Sulfur vacancy-rich MoS2 as a catalyst for the hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol
Propane dehydrogenation: catalyst development, new chemistry, and emerging technologies
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