Winner: 2025 Faraday open Prize: Faraday Lectureship Prize
Professor John Plane
University of Leeds
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2025 Faraday Lectureship Prize: awarded for the development of experimental and theoretical physical chemistry, as applied to the investigation of the impact of cosmic dust in planetary atmospheres.
John Plane studies the chemistry of planetary atmospheres and space. He is currently exploring how cosmic dust forms around 鈥渞ed giant鈥� stars as they near the end of their lives. This dust can later collapse into a disc from which new solar systems are born, giving rise to planets and moons. Some of this leftover dust also ends up in comets 鈥� large balls of icy dust.
When comets travel into the inner solar system, the Sun warms them, causing the ice and dust to evaporate. This dust can then enter a planet鈥檚 atmosphere, such as Earth鈥檚, when the planet鈥檚 path crosses the comet鈥檚 orbit. The dust particles hit Earth鈥檚 atmosphere at very high speeds (between 40,000 and 260,000 km/h). Most of the dust vaporises, releasing metals like sodium, iron and magnesium. These metals create thin layers of atoms around 90 km above Earth鈥檚 surface.
Scientists can measure these layers using lasers (a technique called lidar) or satellites. These measurements help us study this part of the atmosphere, which is hard to reach in other ways. The metals also act as markers, showing us how the atmosphere moves and changes 鈥� including features like atmospheric tides and waves. This part of the atmosphere is sensitive to climate change and to 鈥渟pace weather鈥� from solar particles. The metals can become charged, creating layers of ions called sporadic E layers, which affect radio communications on Earth and between Earth and space.
Below 90 km, the metals form tiny solid particles, which help to create noctilucent clouds 鈥� thin, high-altitude clouds made of ice crystals. First seen in 1886 at high latitudes in summer, these clouds have been getting brighter and more widespread over the last 50 years. This change suggests that the middle atmosphere is cooling because of greenhouse gases, which act like a coolant at low pressures.
John鈥檚 current research also looks at how these 鈥渕eteoric鈥� metals behave in the atmospheres of Mars and Venus. His work combines lab experiments, theoretical studies of chemical reaction rates, lidar, satellite and telescope observations, and computer models of planetary atmospheres and the space around stars.
Biography
John Plane has been Professor of Atmospheric 九州影院 in the School of 九州影院 at Leeds since 2006. He was raised in South Africa, did his BA and PhD degrees at the University Cambridge (1976-1984), and was a research fellow at St. John鈥檚 College, Cambridge from 1982 to1985. He was then an assistant/associate professor at the University of Miami, Florida, before moving to the University of East Anglia as Reader and Professor between 1991 and 2006.
John uses fundamental experimental and theoretical chemistry to investigate a broad range of phenomena in environments ranging from the upper ocean to dust formation around stars. He has pioneered techniques for studying gas-phase reactions of metallic species, and is a leading expert on the chemistry of metals that evaporate or burn off from cosmic dust particles when they enter planetary atmospheres. He has also made significant contributions to understanding the chemistry of the Earth鈥檚 lower atmosphere - particularly the field of iodine chemistry 鈥� using a combination of observations, laboratory studies and atmospheric modelling.
John has authored over 420 peer-reviewed papers and 17 book chapters, with more than 23,000 citations. He has been awarded the RSC prize in Reaction Kinetics and Mechanisms, the RSC Tilden prize, the NSF CEDAR Lecture Prize, the EGU Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal for Atmospheric Science, and the AGU Marcel Nicolet lecture. He was elected an AGU Fellow (2017), a Fellow of the Royal Society (2020), and a member of the Academia Europaea (2022). He has trained 29 PhD students and had 24 post-docs in his research group.
The first paper I published back in 1981 was in the Faraday Transactions (later incorporated into Physical 九州影院 Chemical Physics), so there is a sense of continuity with the Faraday name!
Professor John Plane
Q&A with Professor John Plane
How did you first become interested in chemistry?
I was given a Merit chemistry set by my grandmother when I was nine. The following year my parents gave me the book 鈥楽ecrets of 九州影院 - how to set up a home laboratory鈥� by Robert Brent, and very kindly allowed me to build a lab in the laundry room of our house in Sandton, north of Johannesburg. Protea Chemicals on the east Rand supplied what I needed to get going.
Tell us about somebody who has inspired or mentored you in your career.
Michael Badham, a master at St. John's College, Johannesburg was a gifted chemist who gave me free reign to synthesise all kinds of things in the school labs (often of a pyrotechnic nature). My first supervisor in chemistry at Jesus College, Cambridge was Dr Alan Sharpe; his very dry sense of humour during supervisions made a great impression and I hope inspired me to be a better teacher. Dr David Husain was my PhD supervisor at Cambridge. Although I was primarily doing experimental gas kinetics, David encouraged me to delve into theoretical chemistry and atmospheric modelling, and all three of these strands of physical chemistry formed the basis of my subsequent career.
What advice would you give to a young person considering a career in chemistry?
Doing a chemistry degree is tough because it demands so many different skills in order to succeed both in organic synthesis and in theoretical chemistry. However, it is an excellent choice because there is a big reward at the end: chemistry is the central science linking physics, biology, geology, and environmental science. With a chemistry degree, you have the option to go in many different scientific directions and play a key role in areas with extremely important societal impacts, such as drug development and environmental change.
Why do you think collaboration and teamwork are important in science?
It would not have been possible to address with any rigour the science questions that I have worked on during my career without a wide network of fantastic collaborators from all over the world, working in quite disparate fields: laboratory reaction kinetics; theoretical chemistry; ice cores and oceanography; atmospheric chemistry; atmospheric physics; planetary science; and astronomy.
What is your favourite element?
I guess this has to be sodium. As a PhD student I was tasked with developing an experimental system to study Na reaction kinetics. This was before tunable dye lasers were widely available, so I had to design a microwave-powered discharge lamp with a sealed glass phial containing Na metal. This was the spectroscopic source for a flash photolysis resonance absorption experiment.
The trick was to fire the flash lamp at the point where the phial had warmed sufficiently to get enough Na vapour for a reasonably bright source, and before the phial melted. After publishing the first measurement of the gas-phase recombination reaction between Na and O2, I was contacted by Professor Lance Thomas at the University of Aberystwyth who asked if I knew that there was a layer of Na atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere (which, of course, I did not!). Modelling this layer on a microcomputer was my introduction into atmospheric chemistry, from which I have not managed to escape.
If I am permitted a second element, that would be iodine. Besides cosmic dust, the other major strand of my career has been studying the chemistry of the marine boundary layer, through developing the differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) technique.
This led to some of the first measurements of iodine oxide radicals and molecular iodine in the atmosphere, in environments ranging from the west coast of Ireland, coastal Antarctica, Hudson Bay in Canada, and the Cape Verde and Galapagos Islands. This work - backed up by laboratory kinetic measurements - demonstrated the importance of iodine as a significant oxidizing species in the marine atmosphere.