Dr Jenny Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Materials Chemistry and Anne Logue College Lecturer at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge. She specialises in photosynthesis, bioenergetics, and electrochemistry.

Jenny earned her PhD in bioinorganic chemistry from the University of Sydney, with a research stint at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Later, she joined Cambridge as a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellow to explore how biocatalysts could be harnessed to produce solar fuels—helping to shape the emerging field of semi-artificial photosynthesis.

Since establishing her research group in 2018 with a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship, Jenny is pioneering approaches that combine biological and synthetic materials to develop new biotechnologies for generating clean energy and combating biofouling.

In 2023, she was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Consolidator Grant to develop new strategies for enhancing energy exchange between biological and non-biological systems. Recently, she was awarded a highly sought after European Innovation Council Pathfinder Consortium grant, where she will be coordinator for an international project for producing ‘solar foods’.

Jenny’s interdisciplinary team operates at the crossroads of electrochemistry, synthetic biology, chemical biology, materials science, physics, and engineering. Current projects include the re-wiring of photosynthesis for efficient solar energy conversion, developing electrochemical tools to study coral bleaching, and fighting pathogenic biofilms.

Professor Alexander Forse completed both his undergraduate and PhD degrees at the University of Cambridge, where his research focused on the energy storage mechanisms of supercapacitors. In 2016, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, to work on metal-organic framework materials for carbon dioxide capture.

In 2019, Alexander returned to Cambridge as a group leader and was appointed Professor of Materials Chemistry in October 2024.

In 2020, he was awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship to advance his work on electrochemical carbon dioxide capture—supporting his broader goal of developing materials that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and address the global climate crisis. That same year, he received the BRSG-NMRDG Prize for excellence in magnetic resonance, a prestigious award recognising significant contributions to the field by an early career researcher.

With support from the Future Leaders Fellowship, Alexander established the Forse Research Group, dedicated to understanding and improving materials that combat global warming. Limiting climate change to 1.5 °C requires the rapid development and deployment of innovative greenhouse gas mitigation technologies. The Forse Group investigates the functional behaviour of advanced materials for carbon dioxide capture and electrochemical energy storage. Their research combines nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy with synthetic chemistry, electrochemistry, and computational chemistry, forming a multidisciplinary approach to one of the most pressing challenges of our time.