Telfer Lab

Welcome to Shane Telfer's research group website.  We are a team of synthetic chemists who design and make porous materials for applications in gas capture, separations, and catalysis. We are particularly interested in using porous materials to selectively capture CO2 for climate change remediation.

We are based in the School of Natural Sciences, Massey University, New Zealand.  We are a proud part of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology and have a start-up company focused on carbon dioxide capture using MUF-16: Captivate Technology.

 Latest news

March 2025

Bernard impresses in his PhD oral exam. Arise Dr Auer!!

November 2024

Shane is grateful to receive the NZIC Prize for Industrial and Applied Chemistry, which is a recognition of of the research team - past and present - who have worked on CO2 capture by MUF-16.

November 2024

Ludwig is selected to represent the Manawatū region in the student talk competition at the upcoming NZIC conference.

October 2024

We were awarded a Marsden grant in collaboration with Dr Luke Liu from Victoria University of Wellington.  We are grateful to the Marsden Fund for their continued support of our research.

July 2024

Four of our PhD students head to the MOF conference in Singapore.

March 2024

Our amigos in Mexico did a deep dive on SO2 adsorption in MUF-16!

August 2023

Our paper on hetero-interpenetrated MOFs appears in Nature Chemistry in which we present the first deliberate strategy for preparing knitted MOFs that are built up from two different lattices. Full credit to everyone who pitched in along the journey, which started more than a decade ago when an internship student was using up some compounds that we'd accumulated in the lab: a perfect illustration of the power of undirected research!

News and views commentary on our article here.

July 2023

Our review on multicomponent MOFs appears in Angewandte Chemie. Kudos to Subo for the superb figures. This article is a tribute to all group members - past and present - who have brought multicomponent MOFs to life.  Our lives were changed when the structure of MUF-7 first popped up on the screen back in 2012!

Dec 2021

The brilliant work of the group is recognized by Massey University.

Dec 2021

Shane was on NewsHub discussing a recent paper on the conversion of CO2 to jet fuel.

Sept 2019

Have a listen to our recent radio interview. This arose from a CO2 capture exhibit at Te Papa, the NZ national museum, which has showcased our research to thousands of visitors.

Dec 2018

The MOF2018 conference was a stunning success! Our group helped to host 630 international scientists in NZ for the week. Read more about the event here , and listen to a radio interview with one of our high-profile delegates here.