Professor of Physical Chemistry – UCL
Geoff Thornton received his DPhil from Oxford University on metal oxide crystallography and electronic structure. An 1851 Research Fellowship at UC Berkeley with David Shirley involved photoemission measurements at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. He then took up a lectureship and subsequently a Professorship at Manchester University where he set up a laboratory to study the electronic structure of oxides using angle resolved photoemission, with complementary measurements at the newly opened Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury Laboratory. Between 1988 and 1998 he was Assistant Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Surface Science at Liverpool and Manchester Universities, where he played a key role in setting up and operating scanning probe instruments as well as two purpose-built beamlines at Daresbury Lab. In 2003 he moved to the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Chemistry Department at UCL as Professor of Physical Chemistry. He has played a leading role in the development of metal oxide surface science, in particular through the application of scanning probe, diffraction and fs pump probe techniques. Research continues to focus on structure/property relations of metal oxide surfaces and nanostructures, although with a shift in emphasis towards solid/liquid interfaces and other systems relevant to light harvesting applications.
He has served on a number of editorial advisory boards, including Surface Science and Surface Science Reports. He chaired the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Diamond Light Source 2007-2009. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Physics. He has received a number of awards, including a 2010 ERC Advanced Grant, the 2011 Surface and Interfaces Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a 2012 Humboldt Prize, a 2013 Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award, the 2014 British Vacuum Council Senior Prize and John Yarwood Memorial Medal, and the 2015 Tabor Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics. He has over 350 publications; including the recent book ‘Defects on Oxide Surfaces’.
