Massey researcher named in prestigious UK science award

The Pioneers in Hybrid Glass Research Group are a team of 18 researchers from 10 countries, led by Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury-based MacDiarmid Institute Investigator Professor Tom Bennett. The team have been named the winners of the Dalton Horizon Prize for the discovery and development of hybrid glasses.

Professor Bennett says hybrid glass is the first new chemical family of glasses formed since metallic glasses in the 1970s.

“Nearly all glass is the type we see — or rather don’t see — in our houses, and two other types of glass have been known about for some time: organic glass and metallic glass. This new metal-organic or ‘hybrid’ glass is now considered to constitute a fourth category of glass chemistry.”

Professor Telfer says it was exciting to be part of the team that made the discovery.

MacDiarmid Institute Director Professor Nicola Gaston notes that the three New Zealand-based researchers are all part of the Institute’s Catalytic Architectures research programme.

“Thomas Bennett, Matthew Cowan and Shane Telfer are all part of our Towards Zero-Carbon Catalytic Architectures research, where we’re focusing on materials that can capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then transform this into green fuels.

“These are hard scientific challenges, and that is why, as a Centre of Research Excellence, we target them. This award by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry shows the research of these MacDiarmid Institute investigators is at the leading edge of international developments on these challenging topics.”

Professor Bennett says the finding initially caught the researchers by surprise.

“In 2015, I was looking at how materials expand or contract when heated, when a colleague in Denmark who I was collaborating with emailed to say that that the material melts.

“My first thought was ‘no it doesn’t’, but then I saw a picture and realised it had melted, and had actually formed a new glass.”

He says the timing couldn’t have been better.

“This opened up a thousand questions for me – what’s its structure? How are the atoms bonded? What are its physical and mechanical properties? I later realised that these ‘hybrid glasses’ could separate gases including carbon dioxide.”

Professor Gaston says the award also showed the impact of international and interdisciplinary collaboration.

“When they can bring their expertise together, researchers from different disciplines at different universities in a small country like New Zealand can, and do, deliver scale and impact.”

Professor Shane Telfer and University of Canterbury’s Dr Matt Cowan have been collaborating through the MacDiarmid Institute for many years and have worked closely with Professor Tom Bennett, who first met many of the MacDiarmid Institute team when he spent time at the University of Canterbury as an Erskine Fellow in 2019.