Alexei Kornyshev wins International Society of Electrochemistry Gold Medal

Professor Alexei Kornyshev won the Electrochimica Acta Gold Medal for significant contributions to electrochemistry.

He is the third British scientist to win this medal, which is the highest award of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE). It was announced last week at the General Assembly of the ISE. As part of the prize, he will give the award plenary lecture at next year’s annual meeting.

We caught up with Professor Kornyshev to get his reaction to the win.

This is the first time the ISE Gold Medal has been awarded to a theorist. What does a theoretical chemist study?

I don't see myself as a theoretical chemist, I'm rather theoretical physicist who works in the area of chemical physics, and primarily in condensed matter chemical physics, with applications to electrochemistry, biophysics, nanoscience, energy, and novel materials.

Theoretical chemists may use first-principle approaches to calculate things such as the properties of molecules and reaction pathways, whereas theoretical physicists’ approach is to build a model to try to capture the most important features of the system, write some simple-as-possible equations, and then to have predictions as a result of solving those equations.

This award is for electrochemistry, but I don't work anymore in what can be called classical electrochemistry such as electrocatalysis, batteries, solar cells or other very important mainstream things. Electrochemical processes are crucial for what is happening in living matter, where electrical signals and voltage drops control chemical reactions, for example. But electrochemistry can be applied much further, for various systems of sustainable energy, micro-robotics, nano-diodes, and electrochemically controlled photonic materials.

I'm trying to push forward the concept of electrochemical ‘metamaterials’ – materials with odd, disruptive, novel functions, the properties of which can be electrochemically controlled by tiny voltage variations.

Why did you choose this field?

It is commonly said that physicists believe that there are some kinds of universal laws underlying every phenomenon. The biologists majorly don't believe that in principle; they are proud and happy identifying that the underling mechanisms of the phenomena they study become more and more complex. And chemistry is in between – for me it's a complicated version of physics.

In particular, if we speak about electrochemistry, in its essence it is physics, but it involves a knowledge of real chemistry of the properties of molecules, liquids, solids, and their interfaces. But there are clearly many general rules that physicists can uncover there, so I was excited by the complexity of electrochemistry, in which I believe one can still distinguish some general trends or big things that can be described in a unified fashion.

What is it like to see some of your theories come to life in the lab when you work with experimentalists?

Working with experimentalists and seeing the things that are really working is extremely rewarding. It's huge when we can see that the predictions of the theory are working very well – effects are seen where they should be and not seen where they should not be!

If you try to apply physics to describe very complex ‘chemical’ systems, and if this works as predicted by physical theory, it means that you were able to capture the key factors, and what you considered secondary could indeed be neglected. In our everyday lives, the most important thing is to distinguish between the important and unimportant. Every day we have to make decisions about what we can ignore and neglect, and what we should take close to our heart – it’s the same thing in research.

What have been some of the scientific highlights of your career?

I worked in many areas of fundamental chemical physics, as well as applied science, such as the theory of fuel cells and supercapacitors, where physical theory can do a lot. These works gain a lot of citations, but there are other ones very important to me. I worked with my science partner at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Sergey Leikin, to build the first detailed theory of interactions of helical molecules in solution. That theory, which was very difficult at the beginning, resulted in a variety of predictions and rationalised many observations.

One was the effect of how genes can recognise each other in the precursor stage of the so-called homologous recombination.  Genetic recombination lies in the heart of evolution, genetic diversity, and robustness of life (DNA repair). But it's very important that the genes responsible for the same function will be swapped in genetic recombination, because if they erroneously swap the wrong genes then there will be consequences, such as heavy genetic diseases, or cell death contributing to ageing.

We initiated experiments to check the predictions of that theory, which were completed here at Imperial in 2008, and then by a team at Harvard using different methods, and then by our teams combined. But it's still not enough, because to convince biologists of the importance of a physical phenomenon in the most fundamental process of molecular biology, you have to demonstrate this effect not in a ‘test tube’ but in a cell. We now have a Leverhulme grant-funded project with a wonderful team of experimentalists at Imperial who are going to try to experimentally manifest these phenomena and check the predictions of the theory in a synthetic cell.

The other big thing was our photonics work with Professor Joshua Edel and Professor Anthony Kucernak on electrochemically tunable optical filters. But at the moment we have no funds to develop it further and to explore large-scale applications of our findings.

One spinoff of that we had, together with my very talented postdoc who is now an Assistant Professor in the Indian Institute of Technology, Dr Debabrata Sikdar, and Professor Sir John Pendry, was a discovery of how to dramatically enhance the performance of LED chips. We theoretically predicted how to suppress the internal reflection of light, which will make them brighter, as well ensuring the chip will not get overheated and thus will live much longer, which can have huge consequences on the market. Those predictions are being tested in the laboratory of Joshua Edel.

I also liked very much the work that we recently did with the international group associated with the prediction that a single molecule can work as a diode, meaning it can translate electrical current in one direction with one strength and the opposite direction with the other strength. It’s called rectification, and people have been dreaming about using this for nanodiodes. Our prediction of this effect was made in 2006, but this year it was demonstrated experimentally.

You've collaborated with a lot of international partners throughout your career. Why is this important to you?

What you need for successful collaboration is a complementarity of skills, know-how and knowledge, and most importantly -- the right ‘chemistry’ between the partners. But you rarely can just start it in one day – you combine the skills and also equipment, methods and other things over years. The people to do this very often can be anywhere. Sometimes, they can be in such places like Harvard and MIT, they can be in China or India, Israel, or in the centers of excellence of Europe, be it in Germany or France, or Eastern Europe where some directions of research may be particularly well advanced.

I have recently cooperated with groups in Ukraine, in Lviv, and in spite of the severity of the war imposed on them, they continue to do top-quality work, fully devoted to science.

But what I also get through all those collaborations are friendships. And the friendships are probably the most important thing in our life. I have such friends for life in the United States, Germany, China.  France, Israel – anywhere. And that's a great privilege of scientists to have that opportunity.

You're the third Brit to win the ISE Gold Medal. What does that mean to you?

I'm a British citizen already for quite a long time and have been at Imperial for over 20 years. But my career can be split into three periods: there was a Russian period where I was brought up as a scientist, and then a German period where I matured as a real PI and the leader of a lab, and when I joined the mighty Imperial, people enthusiastically accepted me.

Whenever you get some kind of external recognition or international acknowledgement, you're feeling that you pay that back, so to speak. So that the people who believed in you, didn't make an error!

Also, most of those works that have been internationally recognised were done in teams. They were even rarely purely Imperial teams or UK teams, although many of them were initiated at Imperial, the environment of which is particularly stimulating for collaborative research. Any measure of esteem recognises those activities.