Monday, April 27 & Tuesday, April 28 with Pat Unwin
Pat Unwin from University of Warick was welcomed to the University of Utah's Department of Chemistry on April 27 and 28, 2026 to present the J. Calvin Giddings Lectureship. The J. Calvin Giddings Lectureship was established in the year 2000 and since has hosted outstanding scientist speakers. Professor Pat Unwin shared his work on The Long and Winding Road to Nanoscale Electrochemistry and Tales of the Unexpected: The Continuing Story of Electrochemistry at Carbon Electrodes.
Professor J. Calvin Giddings was a graduate of Brigham Young University, earned his Ph.D. under Henry Eyring at the University of Utah in 1954, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin. He joined the faculty of the University of Utah in 1957. Among analytical chemists, Professor Giddings was best known as a pioneer in chromatography and separations, particularly in theory and teaching. Giddings established the journal Separation Science and Technology and was editor for over 30 years. He authored over 400 scientific publications, including the theoretical landmark books Dynamics of Chromatography, and Unified Separation Science, widely used in graduate-level separation courses. He also invented Field Flow Fractionation and led the way in its development and application.
Pat Unwin
Patrick Unwin is an inventor of transformative instrumental techniques that have reshaped how scientists' study electrochemical and interfacial processes. His pioneering work in electrochemical imaging has enabled researchers to probe the fundamental features of complex electrodes with unprecedented detail.
Techniques and instruments developed in his group are now used worldwide, with several commercialized by major instrument manufacturers. He has authored more than 450 papers, book chapters, and patents.
Patrick is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, Director of the Warwick Centre for Experimental Fuel Technologies, and former Head of Chemistry. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2024 and is also a Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry and the Royal Society of Chemistry. His contributions have been recognized with major international awards from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society, the International Society of Electrochemistry, and the Society of Electroanalytical Chemistry. He has held an ERC Advanced Investigator Award and a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACS Electrochemistry.
He graduated top of his class from the University of Liverpool (BSc, 1985) and earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford (1989). After a Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College and a SERC/NATO Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin with Prof. Al Bard, he joined Warwick in 1991, where he established the Warwick Electrochemistry & Interfaces Group. He has since served in multiple leadership roles, including founding director positions in analytical sciences and doctoral training.
More than 80 PhD students and 35 postdoctoral fellows have trained in his group, with over 30 alumni now leading independent academic groups worldwide and many others holding senior roles in industry.
Outside the lab, Pat is an avid runner, hiker, and musician (vocals, keyboard, guitar). He occasionally performs live and has recorded original music with his band, PapaRoro.
The Long and Winding Road to Nanoscale Electrochemistry
Abstract: From the earliest days, electrochemists sought to visualize processes at electrochemical interfaces, and this remains true today; there is an increasing variety of microscopy techniques that have been developed to investigate electrodes and electrified interfaces in-situ and operando. In this lecture, I will describe how and why I became interested in scanned electrochemical probe microscopes, and how my lab developed scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM) and a general platform for electrochemical imaging. I will discuss the highs and lows, some of the challenges – technological, scientific and cultural – and the path that eventually led to a versatile and robust platform and workflows that are now used in dozens of labs around the world. Key discoveries from SECCM in fundamental electrochemistry, (electro)catalysis, corrosion, and charge storage will be highlighted, and I shall outline future directions for this technique and its role in a new era of high throughput nanoscale electrochemistry.
Tales of the Unexpected: The Continuing Story of Electrochemistry at Carbon Electrodes
Abstract: A wide variety of carbon materials are used in electrochemistry, with diverse applications that include (bio)electroanalysis and sensors, batteries and fuel cells, and membranes. The family of carbon materials is broad, spanning sp2 and sp3 materials, and includes 1D carbon nanotubes, 2D graphene (and non-carbon analogues) and 3D graphite and conducting diamond, along with amorphous carbon and various composites. The electronic properties of each of these materials are further influenced by local structure and defects, method of preparation, and (for 1-D and 2-D materials) the conducting support, the number of layers, and their arrangement. Ultimately, all of these factors can influence interfacial charge transfer and electrochemistry. In this lecture, I shall discuss our work in this area, which has provided significant new insights into structure-activity across a wide range of carbon materials and electrochemical processes. We combine high resolution electrochemical imaging data with information from other microscopy and spectroscopy techniques applied to the same area of an electrode surface, in a correlative electrochemical microscopy approach, to produce highly resolved and unambiguous pictures of electrode activity at the nanoscale. The new models of electrochemistry offer surprises, overturn longstanding dogma, unify observations across length scales, and provide a foundation for future rational applications of carbon electrodes.
Host: Long Luo
History of Giddings Lecture Speakers at the University of Utah
2025
Evan Williams, University of California-Berkley
Overcoming Molecular Complexity One Ion at a Time and A Window into Molecular Complexity with Mass Spectrometry: From Physics to Chemistry to Biology and Beyond
2023-2024
Marc Koper, Leiden University
How to understand rates of electrocatalytic reactions & How to make green hydrogen
2022-2023
2020-2021
Structural Characterization of Lipids, Nucleic Acids, Proteins, and Molecular Machines using Ion/Ion Chemistry
2019-2020
Jeanne Pemberton, University of Arizona
Fun with Sugars: Some Mundane and Not-So-Mundane New Materials from Glycolipids
2017-2018
Nanostructured Mesoscale Optical Materials
Operando Methods for The Study of Energy Materials & The Energy Landscape in the Age of Sustainability
2014-2015
Surfaces: The work of the devil?
2013-2014
Chromatography: the transport processes that make it work & Submicrometer silica particles in protein electrophoresis
2011-2012
Chemical Cytometry - the Analysis of the Content of Single Cells & The Role of Analytical Chemistry in Sequencing the Human Genome
2010-2011
Electrochemical Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy: Past, Present and Future & Nanostructure-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy: Towards a Versatile Analytical Strategy
2007-2008
Nanoplasmonics: From Physics to DNA Diagnostics
2005-2006
Making it Count: Quantitation of Low-Copy-Number Proteins in Single Cells
2000-2001
The inaugural speaker of the lecture
Analytical Glycobiology: a Methodological Frontier & Exploring the Limits of Separating Power: A Scientific Legacy of J. Calvin Giddings