Remembering Ian Manners: Canada 150 Research Chair leaves legacy at University of Victoria and beyond

When the world-renowned chemist Ian Manners accepted a Canada 150 Research Chair position at the University of Victoria in 2018, it started a chain reaction.

“Ian was prolific,” says Etienne LaPierre, who joined the Manners Group as a postdoctoral fellow. “When you have the creativity and the drive and the gumption to do these impressive things, it sets a new standard. I think that’s going to last at UVic.”

Sadly, Manners passed away from cancer in December 2023. He is deeply missed by his family, friends and people he worked with around the world. After his death, a memorial symposium in Victoria drew speakers from as far away as the United Kingdom, Australia, China and Japan. They lauded his exceptional knowledge, problem-solving skills, and mentorship role in shaping the careers of hundreds of students. The name Ian Manners is on some 800 papers in scientific journals, 12 patents and four books; he is one of the most oft-cited inorganic chemists in the world.

“Ian’s passion for science, his enthusiasm for science, his positivity, it was contagious. It really was,” says Ali Nazemi, who studied under Manners and is now a chemistry professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

It was a coup for UVic to recruit Manners from the University of Bristol in the UK. It was made possible by the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program, a one-time investment by the Government of Canada of $117.6 million to enable the country’s universities to attract top-tier, internationally based scholars and researchers to Canada, in celebration of the country’s 150th anniversary in 2017.

Manners was named the Canada 150 Research Chair in Materials Science, a branch of study about enhancing the performance of existing materials and developing new ones for a range of applications. His esteemed reputation in this field dates back decades; he first joined the University of Toronto’s chemistry department in 1990 and was appointed one of the first Tier 1 Canada Research Chairs in 2001. Later, after he had returned to his native England and the University of Bristol, his research team built nanoparticles that no one else could, and made a game-changing discovery with other collaborators that some polymer-based materials could be made to “grow.”

At UVic, Manners headed up the newly constructed Laboratory for Synthetic Self-Assembled Materials, building a team of 30 coworkers.

“After Brexit, Ian thought Canada was a better place to build a multicultural and diverse research group,” says Diego Garcia Hernandez, who earned his PhD under Manners’ supervision. “That’s something he’d always been proud of, bringing together this group of intelligent, international people.”

As a Canada 150 Research Chair, Manners pursued his interest in new applications for synthetic materials. The work he leaves behind has implications for fields as wide-ranging as developing hydrogen storage, information storage, nanoelectronics and medicine.

“He put out papers that looked at nanoparticles for drug delivery and antibacterial activities, and also energetic applications like how these fibres can conduct charge and energy,” LaPierre says. “He moved from fundamentals to applications, really putting them to work.”

Equally significant is the mentorship role Manners played. More than 55 of the researchers he worked with have established prominent scientific careers of their own, such as chemists Mark MacLaughlin and Derek Gates at The University of British Columbia.

“They still went back to Ian for advice, and so did I,” says Daniel Foucher, Manners’ first doctoral student and a chemistry professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. “He’s looking at your proposals, he’s giving you feedback, he’s really trying to help you get better, and he always did that with the students as well. That was probably the biggest influence.”

Since Manners’ passing, students with The Manners Group have continued to pursue their chemistry careers with the help of the community he built: UVic professors and former students who are now professors and researchers active internationally. This group includes Manners’s wife, Deborah O’Hanlon Manners, a scientist who has long played a key role in running the lab, as secretary and researcher coordinator.

“We still have these awesome mentors who are helping us, reading papers and presentations and all that,” says Hayley Parkin, a UVic student. Just this past summer, Parking passed her oral thesis defence, earning her doctorate title.

“It’s been really supportive,” she says.  

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Keywords

• Chemistry
• Mentorship
• Materials Science
• Patents
• Nanoelectronics
• International
• Information storage
• Synthetic materials
• Community