Professor Robert Mokaya OBE

Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor

Robert was appointed as Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield from June 2024. 

Robert received his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry (1988) from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and was awarded his PhD from the University of Cambridge (1992). Following a Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship in 1996. He joined the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham as a lecturer in Materials Chemistry in 2000 and progressed to Professor of Materials Chemistry (2008). From 2016 to 2018 he was Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement at the University of Nottingham and then the Pro-Vice-Chancellor Global Engagement from 2019 to 2024.

Robert is President-Elect of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2024 -2026) and will be President in 2026 to 2028. He is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder (2017- 2022), was appointed OBE in 2022 for services to the Chemical Sciences and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2023.

His research interests are on the design, synthesis and characterisation of new forms of sustainable porous materials and the study of their structure-property relations. The research involves exploring fundamentally new synthesis methods that are simpler, cheaper, and more efficient and offer valorisation routes to materials with optimised properties for targeted sustainable energy applications.