Kim Jelfs

Jelfs studied chemistry at University College London.[1] For her final year project, Jelfs worked at the Royal Institution.[2] She earned her PhD in 2010, working with Ben Slater on modelling the growth of zeolitic materials.[2][3]

After completing her PhD Jelfs joined the University of Barcelona, working with Stefan Bromley. She moved to the University of Liverpool, working as a postdoctoral researcher with Matthew Rosseinsky and Andrew Ian Cooper.[2] At the University of Liverpool Jelfs characterised the structure of porous materials.[2] She was funded by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Programme Grant.[4][5]

In 2013 she joined Imperial College London as a Royal Society University Research Fellow.[1] In 2015 she was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant, which provides €1.5 million funding for five years of materials discovery.[6][7][8] Her research will consider porous molecules, organic small molecules and polymers.[8] She uses computational models to predict the relationships between structure and properties.[9] The models can also be used to predict the properties of amorphous frameworks and porous molecules.[9] Her group identified the 20 most probable topologies for porous cage molecules, which can be synthesised through dynamic covalent chemistry.[10]

In 2018 Jelfs was awarded the Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry.[2] She was also awarded an Imperial College London President's Award for Outstanding Early Career Research.[11][12] In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Chemistry.[13]