Rate My Professor Tom Bennet

Professor Thomas Bennett is a Professor in the School of Physical & Chemical Sciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Canterbury, having joined the institution in 2024. He was promoted to Professor at the University of Cambridge in 2023 following an illustrious career there. Bennett obtained his MSci (Hons) in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2008 and completed his PhD in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Anthony Cheetham FRS, focusing on the physical properties of porous hybrid frameworks. Early in his career, he held a three-year Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, while lecturing on materials chemistry. In 2016, he commenced a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, complemented by visiting adjunct professor positions at Wuhan University of Technology, a visiting scientist role at CSIRO Melbourne, and research stays at the University of Kyoto, an earlier fellowship at the University of Canterbury, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Bennett's research centers on the discovery of hybrid melt-quenched glasses from metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), seminal explorations of coordination polymer, MOF, and glass interfaces, and the characterization of amorphous solids and liquids to create new functional materials. Notable publications include 'Amorphous metal–organic frameworks' (Accounts of Chemical Research, 2014), 'Melt-quenched glasses of metal–organic frameworks' (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2016), 'Liquid metal–organic frameworks' (Nature Materials, 2017), and 'The changing state of porous materials' (Nature Materials, 2021). His contributions have earned prestigious awards such as the EPSRC Post-Doctoral Prize (2012), Panalytical Award for X-ray Diffraction (2013), ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Science Impact Award (2018), Woldemar A. Weyl Award for Glass Science (2019), Philip Leverhulme Prize in Chemistry (2019), Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison Meldola Memorial Prize (2020), and Chemical Communications Lectureship (2022). Bennett served as vice-Chair of the International Zeolite Association Commission on MOFs (2019–2022) and inaugural Chair of the Royal Society of Chemistry Interest Group on Porous Materials (2019–2022), with the latter receiving the RSC Inspirational Committee Award in 2021. In 2024, he received a Marsden Fund grant for pioneering perovskite glass materials research. Recently, his team won the Dalton Divisions Horizon Prize for hybrid glass in 2025.