Martin Heeney joined KAUST in 2022 as a professor of chemistry in the Physical Science and Engineering Division and is the founder of the Organic Materials Group (OMG). He received his Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia (UEA), and following an industrial postdoc, joined Merck Chemicals in 2000, eventually becoming project leader in their organic electronics team. He moved to academia in 2007, first joining the Materials Science and Engineering department at Queen Mary University of London as a senior lecturer and, subsequently, the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London in 2009, becoming full professor in 2014. He sits on the editorial advisory board of several journals such as Materials Horizons, Aggregate and Small Methods, and is an associate editor for Polymer International.​

Professor Heeney’s research interests span the design, synthesis and characterization ofconjugated polymers and organic semiconductor materials for a range of applications,including solar cells, photodetectors, organic (electrochemical) transistors and sensordevices. He is also active in the design of new photocatalytic materials and blends. Hisresearch is highly multidisciplinary, covering aspects of organic, polymer and materialschemistry and science, with a central goal of establishing new relationships betweenmolecular design, synthetic methodology, processing and device performance. He runs acollaborative group involving numerous colleagues from KAUST and around the world.Recent projects include the development of polymer editing methods, the optimization ofinterlayer materials and dopants to improve device performance, the design of low band gapmaterials for solar cell and photodetector applications, and the synthesis of highly stablepolymers for electrochemical devices. ​