Current Affiliation: Laureate Professor & Global Innovation Chair Professor, Director of Global Innovative Centre for Advanced Nanomaterials (GICAN), The University of Newcastle (Australia)
Ajayan Vinu is an Indian-origin world-class materials scientist, globally celebrated as the pioneer of mesoporous carbon nitride materials, whose breakthroughs revolutionized catalysis, hydrogen production and carbon capture technology.

He registered his PhD at Anna University while conducting doctoral research at Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany from 2000 to 2003. He completed an ICYS fellowship and worked as a senior researcher at National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan from 2004 to 2011. He served as Professor & ARC Future Fellow at the University of Queensland (2011–2015), then Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of South Australia (2015–2017). He took office as Director of GICAN at the University of Newcastle in October 2017, managing a research team of over 60 PhD students and staff.

He holds numerous international fellow titles: Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Fellow of Royal Australian Chemical Institute (FRACI), Fellow of World Academy of Ceramics, and Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. His awards include the Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award, JSPS Senior Invitational Fellowship, and multiple Asian chemistry medals. He has published more than 600 peer-reviewed papers with over 44,800 citations and an h-index of 109, alongside 32 global patents on nanoporous materials. He was the first researcher to create controllable porosity in carbon nitride frameworks, enabling their wide use in photocatalytic water splitting for hydrogen evolution, CO₂ adsorption and energy storage devices.

Ajayan Vinu’s core research focuses on the design, synthesis and functionalization of mesoporous carbon, carbon nitride and nanoporous inorganic materials for catalysis, renewable energy conversion and carbon capture.