Principal Investigator

Dr. Stuart Linley

Assistant Professor

Stuart is a chemical and materials engineer from southern Ontario who has been researching functional materials for environmental applications for over a decade. He graduated from the University of Waterloo with a BASc in Nanotechnology Engineering in 2014 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering - Nanotechnology in 2019 under the supervision of Frank Gu. During his PhD, he co-founded water treatment start-up company H2nanO to scale functional materials for sustainable water treatment. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Neil Thomson at the University of Waterloo from 2019-2020. From 2020-2023, he held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge's Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, working with Erwin Reisner

Stuart's specific research pursuits have included reusable photocatalyst composites for wastewater treatment and solar reforming, nanoparticles with functional polymer coatings for targeted delivery to subsurface and groundwater contaminants, and synthesis techniques for inorganic nano- and microscale colloids. A list of Stuart's publications can be found here.

Graduate Students

Alibek Kurbanov

MASc - Chemical Engineering

Alibek Kurbanov is from Turkmenistan and completed his B.Eng in Chemical Engineering at Tianjin University in China under a fully funded CSC scholarship. He has a background in photocatalysis with two co-authored publications on developing catalytic materials for hydrogen evolution from ammonia-borane (IJHE, 2023; JCIS, 2023).

Alibek is currently pursuing his MASc in Chemical Engineering at McMaster University. His research focuses on developing floating carbon nitride-based photocatalysts for solar-driven hydrogen production and wastewater treatment. Outside the lab, Alibek is a table tennis player and regularly competes in local tournaments across Ontario. Alibek can be reached at kurbanoa@mcmaster.ca

Undergraduate Students

Julie Liu

BEng - Chemical and Biomedical Engineering

Julie is a second-year co-op student studying Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at McMaster University. She is currently an NSERC USRA holder working on testing floating photocatalytic composites for sustainable solar reforming of wastewater products into usable hydrogen. Her research interests lie in anything chemistry-related, particularly topics associated with process systems, materials science, environmental sustainability, biotechnology and drug development. In her free time, she enjoys folding origami, figure skating, and reading.