Dr Charlie Ruffman

Associate Investigator

Towards Zero Carbon - Catalytic Architectures

Address:
Department of Physics
University of Auckland
38 Princes Street,
Auckland 1010

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• charlie.ruffman@auckland.ac.nz
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Biography

Charlie is a Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland - Waipapa Taumata Rau. He received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Otago in 2021, where he worked on modelling and optimising affordable catalysts for hydrogen production. Charlie was awarded a Rutherford Post-doctoral Fellowship by the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2021 to investigate new liquid metal catalysts for carbon dioxide reduction. In 2023, he received an independent Marsden Fast-Start Grant to continue his work on liquid metals and determine how their structure can be controlled by the addition of supporting materials. 

Research interests

Charlie is interested in catalyst structure and optimisation at the nanoscale. Sitting at the interface between chemistry and physics, he aims to understand how materials function at the atomic and electronic level through the application of density functional theory calculations and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. He also has an interest in developing techniques to model novel challenging materials.

His current research is centred around liquid metal catalysts, including their application to electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction. One research avenue on this front is identifying structural patterns in these liquid metal materials, and controlling their behaviour so they can be better applied. Charlie believes that understanding the dynamics of nanoscale systems could unlock new key principles in functional materials design.