Matthew’s research career uses innovative technologies to face down climate change. His goal is to reduce the amount of energy we need to use every day—so we can have some spare for the things we want to do!
Growing up in Dunedin, New Zealand, Matthew’s interests led to a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Otago. One day he mixed silver into his reaction flask, creating a material that filled itself with carbon dioxide and started him on a trajectory to confront climate change.
Matthew’s silver moment took him halfway around the world, and his research expanded into Chemical Engineering. In Boulder, Colorado, he joined a chemical engineering group, an innovative company, and an oil company interested in capturing all the carbon dioxide coming out of fossil-fuel power plants. Together they made a membrane material that could do it! Governments changed, markets disappeared, and the world passed their technology by—but the underlying science is still raring to go!
Back in New Zealand as a Rutherford Fellow at the University of Canterbury, Matthew has established a network of scientists and engineers in Australasia, America, France, and England to develop new adsorbent materials for using in low-energy processes for separating the enormous quantities of industrial gases the world uses every day.
