Professor Liming Dai is a UNSW Scientia Professor, an ARC Laureate Fellow and an Australian Academy of Science Fellow. He is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Carbon Science and Innovation. He is also Funding Director of the Centre for Advanced Carbon Materials at UNSW. Previously, he was a Principal Research Scientist in CSIRO at Clayton (1992-2002), an Associate Professor of Polymer Engineering at the University of Akron (2002-2004), the Wright Brothers Institute Endowed Chair Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of Dayton (2004-2009), and the Kent Hale Smith Professor in the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (2009-2019).

Professor Dai’s expertise covers the synthesis, functionalization, and device fabrication of conjugated polymers and carbon nanomaterials for energy-related and biomedical applications. Among his many pioneering scientific achievements, he is widely recognised as a pioneer and leading scientist in the research and development of carbon-based metal-free electrocatalysts for renewable energy technologies. He has published more than 500 journal publications with citations over 83,000 and an h-index of 146 (as of Aug 2020, Google Scholar). He has also published a researchonograph on intelligent macromolecules and 5 edited/co-edited books on carbon nanomaterials for advanced energy systems and biomedical applications, including 2-volume edited book on Carbon-based Metal-free Catalysts by Wiley-VCH. He is a Clarivate Analytics World’s Highly Cited Researcher (both in Materials and Chemistry). He serves as an Associate Editor of Nano Energy and editorial board member of more than 10 international journals.  

Professor Dai has been honoured with many awards and accolades, most recently receiving the 2019 IUMRS-Somiya Award from the International Union of Materials Research Societies, the 2019 Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship, and the 2018 Advanced Materials Hall of Fame. He also severs as an Advisory Committee Member of the American Carbon Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Fellow of the International Association of Advanced Materials, Fellow of the (US) National Academy of Inventors and Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences.