Robert Mokaya is a Kenyan-born professor of Material Chemistry and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement at the University of Nottingham in the UK.
Investigations by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry revealed Mokaya is the only black chemistry professor in the UK. While people around him thought he would become a doctor in the future, he couldn’t abandon his interest in science.
“When you do well in maths, physics, and chemistry, sometimes people assume, ‘Oh, he’s going to be a doctor.’ They didn’t know that I was going to be a doctor, just not a medical doctor,’’ he told Chemistry World.
Having excelled in his high school studies, Mokaya enrolled at the University of Nairobi in the 1980s for his undergraduate studies in chemistry.
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He graduated from the institution in 1988 and joined Unilever Kenya, where he worked for one year before deciding to further his studies.
“I spent a year working for Unilever. And I’m glad I did because it absolutely showed me that I didn’t want to work in that environment. So I spent that year trying to figure out what I was going to do and how I was going to get back to academia and research,’’ added Mokaya
He found a breakthrough after coming across an advertisement for a scholarship to study at Cambridge. He was too quick to apply and won the scholarship.
“I was wandering around the University of Nairobi after I graduated, and I saw this advert saying that you could apply for a scholarship to study at Cambridge. I have this policy where I say, ‘If it’s going to be just one person who gets it, why can’t that person be me?’
“The best way of making sure nothing happens is if you do nothing. But if you do something, something might happen. So I went and put in that application, and something happened. I got the scholarship,’’ he recalled.
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He joined the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1992. At the time, he worked in the laboratory of William “Bill” Jones.
He was at the same year elected to a Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and four years later awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Advanced Fellowship.
He climbed the ranks to become a material chemistry lecturer at the University of Nottingham in 2000 and five years later promoted to Reader in Materials Chemistry within the institution.
Another opportunity presented itself within the organization in 2008, and Mokaya was promoted to Professor of Materials Chemistry.
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He heads a world-leading research group that has been an instrumental part of a Royal Society program working to strengthen the capacity of African researchers in designing, synthesizing, and optimizing porous materials.
It is in this field that his research interests lie in studying their structure-property relations and exploring fundamentally new synthesis methods that are simpler, cheaper, and more efficient, targeted for sustainable energy applications and gas storage.
“I was always curious, as far back as I can remember. I always wanted to find out why things happened the way they did, and I had lots of questions. Many of them remained unanswered,’’ added Mokaya.
Throughout his career, Mokaya has won multiple awards for his contributions to his field of study. In 2017 he was awarded a Royal Society Wolfs on Research Merit Award and the 2022 Officer of the Order of the British Empire award (OBE).