Innis, Peter C. Professor

Prof Innis joined the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) at the University of Wollongong in 1996 as an Associate Research Fellow after obtaining his PhD from UTS. Since then he has made a number of important contributions to the field of organic conducting polymers and their applications. Since 1999, he has been a Chief Investigator on 14 ARC grants, 2 ARC CoE’s and an NHMRC Development grant attracting totalled over $50 million in funding. He has held 2 ARC Fellowships with a 3 year Australian Post-Doctoral Fellowship awarded in 1999 and a 5 year Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship awarded in 2003.

Prof Innis is currently a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence (CE140100012) for Electromaterials Science (ACES) which has been funded from mid-2014 for a total of 7 years. Prior to this he was a CI in the previously funded version of ACES (CE0561616) receiving ARC funding since mid-2005. He holds the position of Associate Professor at UOW and has been the Associate Director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) since 2000. In 2007 IPRI/UOW became the lead institution of the Materials Node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF) as part of the Federal Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Prof Innis is the ANFF Materials Node Manager and is responsible for the coordination of research materials supply as well as overseeing research and development fabrication services provided to end users at UOW, Australian universities, publicly-funded research institutions and commercial entities Australia wide. In this capacity he also provides direct liaison of activities with the Material Node collaborators at the Centre for Organic Electronics (CoE), headed by Prof Dastoor at the University of Newcastle. Since January 2014, he has been actively involved in senior research support capacity at UOW as the Associate Dean (Research) (ADR) and chair of the Research & Training committee at UOW’s Australian Institute for Innovative Materials (AIIM) based at the Innovation Campus in North Wollongong.

Prof Innis has developed extensive expertise in the area of conducting polymers, encompassing their synthesis/purification, characterisation, processability and incorporation into useful devices. He has demonstrated further innovation in the area of photo-electrochemistry and photoelectron transfer processes between conducting polymers and other redox materials. Significant expertise has also been developed by Prof Innis in the area of advanced electrochemical characterisation techniques including electron spin resonance, Raman and fluorescence spectroscopies. His more recent research has been into nanostructured graphene composites and electroactive fibres and the development of advanced textile architectures for electrofluidic separation technologies.