Profile
Dr. Opoku Francis received his BSc and MPhil degrees from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in 2010 and 2014, respectively. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in 2019. Subsequently, he was a Global Excellence Stature 4.0 Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Johannesburg, designing the adsorption of small molecules incorporating density functional theory simulations. In 2020, he joined the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Physical and Computational Sciences, KNUST, as a lecturer.
Dr. Opoku specializes in the computational and experimental design of novel two-dimensional (2D) materials for various advanced applications, including:
- Water splitting (for hydrogen production)
- Photodegradation of organic pollutants (environmental remediation)
- Molecular and gas sensors (for detecting harmful substances)
- Optoelectronic devices (e.g., LEDs, photodetectors)
- Thermoelectric materials (for energy harvesting)
- Photovoltaic cells (solar energy conversion)
- Lithium/Sodium/Magnesium ion batteries
His work contributes to renewable energy, environmental sustainability, and nanotechnology, making him a key researcher in materials chemistry within Ghana and beyond.
He has published more than 100 publications appearing in high-impact peer-reviewed journals like the New Journal of Chemistry, Scientific Reports, Journal of Cleaner Production, Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, Chemical Engineering Journal, and ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, to name but a few. The high quality of his research papers is evidenced by the high number of scholar google citations he has received from other researchers (total citation = 3639; h-index = 32; i10-index = 63). He has also written a book entitled Molecular Modelling of Vitamin B12 and its Analogues, 4 book chapters, and successfully supervised 2 PhD, 1 MPhil, 2 MSc, and 24 BSc theses.
He serves as an editorial member for Scientific Reports and actively contributes to the scientific community by reviewing for several prestigious journals, including the New Journal of Chemistry, RSC Advances, Material Advances, Energy Advances, and Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (which is published under the Royal Society of Chemistry), the International Journal of Environmental Analytical Chemistry (published by Taylor & Francis Ltd), ACS Applied Nano Materials, Chemistry of Materials, The Journal of Physical Chemistry, ACS Applied Energy Materials, and ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (published by the American Chemical Society).
He is working on collaborative projects with the Department of Chemical Sciences, University of Johannesburg (Dr. Tunde Lewis Yusuf); Institute for Nanotechnology and Water Sustainability, College of Science, Engineering and Technology, University of South Africa (Dr. Potlako John Mafa); University of Electronic Science and Technology, China (Prof Hassan Karimi-Maleh) and a German collaborator from Technische Universität Berlin (Dr Mirabbos Hojamberdiev).
WEBSITE/RESEARCH PROFILE LINKS