Rate My Professor Christian Doonan

Professor Christian Doonan is a Professor in the School of Physics, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, College of Sciences, at the University of Adelaide, where he also serves as Director of the Centre for Advanced Nanomaterials. He earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne between 2000 and 2005 and conducted postdoctoral research as a Research Associate at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2007 to 2015. Doonan holds the position of South Australian State Government Future Industry Making Fellow at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Resources and is Research Director of the Scaling Green Hydrogen CRC bid. His career includes an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship from 2011 to 2014 valued at $708,000. Additionally, he was selected as an emerging leader in the Japan-Australia Emerging Leaders Research Program in 2013 and received a JSPS visiting fellowship in 2014.

Doonan's research centers on the development of new porous materials, particularly metal-organic frameworks, for applications in biotechnology, gas storage and separation, and catalysis. This work has produced over 150 publications with approximately 25,000 citations. He has led or participated in more than 20 large-scale multidisciplinary projects, attracting over $42 million in funding from sources including the Australian Research Council, the US Department of Energy, and the erstwhile Defence Science and Technology Organisation, as well as industry collaborations with PETRONAS worth about $3 million AUD focused on hydrogen storage, CO2 capture, and CO2 utilization. Key publications include the comprehensive review 'Metal-organic framework-based enzyme biocomposites' in Chemical Reviews (2021), 'Enhanced Bioactivity of Enzyme/MOF Biocomposite via Host Framework Engineering' in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (2023), and 'Topological analysis and control of post-synthetic metalation sites in Zr-based metal-organic frameworks' in Journal of Materials Chemistry C (2024). Doonan serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of CrystEngComm since 2024, having been Associate Editor since 2020, and is a member of the International Metal-organic Framework Committee since 2019.