Researcher of the year 2011

SMALL PRINT:HERE'S A neat move: take the cheap material graphite (the lead in a pencil), put it into a soapy solution and turn it into billions of flakes of one of the strongest materials known.

That’s the kind of breakthrough that last Monday earned Prof Jonathan Coleman (pictured) the award of Science Foundation Ireland’s Researcher of the Year 2011.

Coleman, who is professor of chemical physics at Trinity College Dublin’s school of physics, and a principal investigator at the SFI-funded Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (Crann), has worked on a range of problems in material science – including how to add tiny polymers into plastics to make them lighter and stronger, and how to use nanowires to improve electronic displays.

He and his team also discovered a relatively easy way to prepare graphene, strong and light one-atom-thick sheets of carbon that could potentially revolutionise manufacturing and electronics. They were able to exfoliate billions of sheets of graphene from graphite in a soapy liquid.

Since then, Coleman has received funding from the European Research Council to work with other layered materials that could lead to more useful batteries.

Last year he was named in the top 100 material scientists worldwide, as compiled by Thomson Reuters for the period between January 2000 and October 2010.

And on Monday night at SFI’s annual summit in Athlone, he was presented with the researcher of the year award by Minister for Research and Innovation, Seán Sherlock.

"I'm truly delighted to win this award," Coleman told The Irish Times. "It's a real validation of all the hard work done by my team over the last few years."