Professor Michail Stamatakis

Michail Stamatakis is Professor of Computational Inorganic Chemistry and Tutorial Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall.

He joined Oxford in 2023, prior to which he was Lecturer (2012-2017), Senior Lecturer (2017-2018), Associate Professor (2018-2022) and Professor (2022-2023) in the Chemical Engineering Department at University College London (UCL). He holds a Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (2004), and a PhD from Rice University, USA (2009), and has carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Delaware, USA (2009-2012). He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Michail’s research focuses on heterogeneous catalysis and is inspired by the urgent need for chemical technologies that promote a sustainable future for contemporary societies. It encompasses activities ranging from fundamental to applied, aiming at not only understanding how catalytic materials accelerate chemical reactions, but also guiding catalyst discovery to improve the efficiency of chemical transformations. Central to these activities is the development of computational methods and software (https://zacros.org) able to capture the molecular-level processes underpinning catalysis. These methods are also applied to study reactions relevant to the conversion of alternative/renewable feedstocks into chemicals and fuels, the management of (greenhouse) gas emissions towards mitigating pollution and climate change, or the engineering of long-lasting catalytic materials for efficient industrial-scale operations.

Michail teaches Inorganic Chemistry at LMH.

Prats, H. and M. Stamatakis (2022). “Atomistic and electronic structure of metal clusters supported on transition metal carbides: implications for catalysis”. Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 10: 1522-1534. (doi: 10.1039/D1TA08468B).

Ravipati, S., Savva, G. D., Christidi, I. A., Guichard, R., Nielsen, J., Réocreux, R. and M. Stamatakis (2022). “Coupling the Time-Warp algorithm with the Graph-Theoretical Kinetic Monte Carlo framework for distributed simulations of heterogeneous catalysts”. Computer Physics Communications, 270: 108148. (doi: 10.1016/j.cpc.2021.108148).

Hannagan, R. T., Giannakakis, G., Réocreux, R., Schumann, J., Finzel, J., Wang, Y., Michaelides, A., Deshlahra, P., Christopher, P., Flytzani-Stephanopoulos, M., Stamatakis, M. and E. C. H. Sykes (2021). “First-principles design of a single-atom–alloy propane dehydrogenation catalyst”. Science, 372(6549): 1444-1447. (doi: 10.1126/science.abg8389).

Papanikolaou, K. G., Darby, M. T. and M. Stamatakis (2020). “Engineering the surface architecture of highly dilute alloys: an ab initio Monte-Carlo approach”. ACS Catalysis, 10: 1224-1236. (doi: 10.1021/acscatal.9b04029).

Marcinkowski, M. D., Darby, M. T., Liu, J., Wimble, J. M., Lucci, F. R., Lee, S., Michaelides, A., Flytzani-Stephanopoulos, M., Stamatakis, M. and E. C. H. Sykes (2018). “Pt/Cu single-atom alloys as coke-resistant catalysts for efficient C-H activation”. Nature Chemistry, 10: 325-332. (doi: 10.1038/nchem.2915).