Richard Winpenny


Richard Eric Parry Winpenny FRSC FLSW is a British chemist and a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. Winpenny's research is within the fields of inorganic chemistry and magnetochemistry, specifically the areas of single-molecule magnetism, inorganic synthesis, supramolecular chemistry and polymetallic caged complexes.

Education

Winpenny was educated at Sandfields Comprehensive School, Port Talbot. He thus completed both his Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degree at Imperial College London in 1985 and 1988, respectively. His PhD on New heterometallic polynuclear complexes was supervised by David Goodgame.

Career

Upon completing his PhD, Winpenny completed his postdoctoral research with John Fackler, Jr at Texas A&M University from 1988 to 1989 where he researched on mass spectrometry of gold clusters. In 1990, he joined the University of Edinburgh as an academic, and in 2000, moved to The University of Manchester as the chair of inorganic chemistry.
Winpenny was the Associate Dean for Research in the University of Manchester Faculty of Science and Engineering from September 2008 to April 2010. He was also the director of the Photon Science Institute from October 2009 to April 2014. Winpenny was also the head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester from August 2014 to April 2018, and is the director and chief scientific officer at Sci-Tron. He was also awarded Engineering and [Physical Sciences Research Council] Established Career Fellowship and also holds a European Research Council Advanced Fellowship from September 2018 to August 2022.

Research

Winpenny developed a wide range of heterometallic rings, examples of molecular magnets,
In 2007, Winpenny reported the first intrinsic spin-lattice and phasecoherence relaxation times in molecular nanomagnets. The results showed that the value of T2 in deuterated samples were of several orders of magnitude longer than the duration of spin manipulations, which satisfies the prerequisite for the deployment of molecular nanomagnets in quantum information applications.
In 2016, Winpenny, Nicholas F. Chilton, and Yan‐Zhen Zheng report a dysprosium complex that showed the largest effective energy barrier to magnetic relaxation of Ueff = 1815 K. The research also showed the largest blocking temperature for a monometallic complex.

Awards and nominations