Professor John R Owen
Emeritus Professor in Electrochemistry
Professor John R Owen is Emeritus Professor in Electrochemistry within Chemistry at the University of Southampton.
John Owen obtained his first degree in Chemistry from Imperial College, London, where he also studied for his Ph.D. in Organic Electro-optic Crystals under the late E.A.D. White. He then worked on Solar Energy at the Materials and Energy Research Centre in Iran until in 1979 revolution brought him back to the Wolfson Centre for Solid State Ionics in Imperial College as Wolfson Fellow working on polymer electrolytes. In 1984 he was appointed lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Chemistry at the University of Salford before joining the School of Chemistry at Southampton in 1990. As founder of the Solid State Electrochemistry Group, he researched into materials for lithium and lithium ion batteries, supercapacitors and electrochromic devices until his recent retirement. Currently he is still engaged part time in some PhD supervision, external examining and consultancy.
John is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a former member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Power Sources. Over the past 30 years he has given invited/keynote lectures on lithium cell characterisation, polymer electrolytes, electrode synthesis, mesoporous materials and high throughput techniques for battery discovery at international meetings in the US, Canada, China, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Argentina, Mexico, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK.