Alexei Lapkin

Professor Alexei Lapkin

FRSC FIChemE

Alexei Lapkin came to Cambridge University in 2013 as a Professor of Sustainable Reaction Engineering, a group that targets methods to speed-up the development and implementation of new chemical manufacturing processes that support the principles of sustainable development.

Alexei Lapkin

Alexei Lapkin studied chemistry at Novosibirsk State University (Russia) and obtained PhD degree at the University of Bath for his work on multifunctional catalytic reactors (under the supervision of late Professor W J Thomas). He held academic positions at Universities of Bath and Warwick prior to joining Cambridge in 2013 as a Professor of Sustainable Reaction Engineering.

He is actively involved in Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES). From January 2025 he is a co-Director of CARES with the responsibility for entrepreneurship. In the last few years, Alexei's research group created two start-up companies: Accelerated Materials Ltd and Chemical Data Intelligence (CDI) Ltd. Recent graduates started a new company ReactWise in 2024. 

 

Research interests

The Sustainable Reaction Engineering group is targeting methods to speed-up the development and implementation of new chemical manufacturing processes that support the principles of sustainable development. At present the group is focussing on the application of machine learning in process development, on datamining of chemical knowledge, automation of model generation, and on specific aspects of process intensification.

Apart from projects in UK, they are involved in two large projects (C4T and eCO2EP) in Cambridge’s Singapore research outlet, the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education (CARES). In these projects they are collaborating with colleagues from NUS and NTU (Singapore) and University of California Berkeley (USA) on new technologies that will significantly reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from industrial processes.