Professor Adam Boies

The Unit's Affiliated Memberships aim to facilitate or enhance long-term collaborations between scientists and experts from across the world with the MRC Toxicology Unit and its groups. Affiliated Members are linked to a group and provide the Affiliates with access to the Unit, its expertise and wider opportunities, making them highly valued members of the Unit's research community.

Adam Boies is Professor of Nanomaterials and Aerosol Engineering and is Head of the Energy Group at the Cambridge University Engineering Department. His research focuses on characterizing the evolution, dynamics and impacts of two-phase reacting flows with an emphasis on aerosol technology applied to energy materials, nanomaterial morphology and particle sensing. His group has developed methods to synthesize and characterize carbon nanotube materials that self-assemble into aerogels which are post processed as advanced fibres or matts. Complimentary work in nanomaterial sensing has enabled new techniques to measure nanomaterial morphology such as fractal structures. Applications of our core technologies include nanomanufacturing processing technologies, electrochemistry applied to lithium-ion electrode materials, filtering and catalysis of pollutants.

Adam serves as director of the Advanced Carbon Application and Manufacturing network and is Partnership Director of the Aerosol Doctoral Training Centre. He is a Fellow of Trinity College and has over 100 publications and 12 patents. He has been granted >$40m total project funding from EPSRC, IUK, EU Horizon2020 and NERC. Technology from his group launched three spin-outs, where he serves as Research Director for Catalytic Instruments (emissions sensing), co-founder of Echion Technologies (lithium ion electrode materials) and has licenced technology to Atmose Ltd (air quality monitoring). He serves as a board member of the UK Aerosol Society and is Chief Scientific Advisor to Q-Flo Technologies.

My research focuses on the evolution, dynamics and impacts of gas-phase nanoparticles. The applications of his research extend to air quality, transportation emissions and engineered nanoparticles for energy applications.

My laboratory activities seek to understand aerosol phenomena within complex reacting flows in order to synthesize unique nanomaterial structures. Currently a major research effort within my laboratory is the synthesis of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) from floating nanoparticle catalysts in a continuous high-throughput process for purposes of fibre spinning and mat production. The resulting CNT materials have unique thermal, electrical and structural properties, which are applied to a number of industrial areas. This work is conducted as a part of an international network based at Cambridge known as the Advanced Nanotube Applications and Manufacturing (ANAM) Initiative,  www.anam.eng.cam.ac.uk.

Other laboratory efforts include the production of nanoparticle catalysts by means of controlling charging behaviour with applications in the automotive catalyst sector. Additionally, I lead projects in developing new particle detection and synthesis techniques.