On October 28, 2025, Professor Shaobin Wang from the School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Australia, delivered an academic lecture titled "Inverse Opal Carbon Nitride for Energy Conversion and Catalysis" for the faculty and students of our college. The lecture was held in Room E202 of the School of Environment, chaired by Associate Professor Yazi Liu, and was attended by over 50 faculty members and students.

Professor Shaobin Wang obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemistry from Peking University, and earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from The University of Queensland, Australia, in 1998. He was conferred the title of John-Curtin Distinguished Professor by Curtin University and is currently an Australian Laureate Professor at the School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Adelaide. His research focuses on the synthesis and application of nanomaterials in adsorption/catalysis, fuel/energy conversion, and environmental remediation. He received the 2012 Thomson Reuters Citation & Innovation Award in Australia and was listed as a Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering, Chemistry, and Environment/Ecology from 2016 to 2022. He now serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, Editor-in-Chief of Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, and sits on the editorial boards of several international journals.

Professor Shaobin Wang began by surveying advances in waste-plastic valorisation and photocatalysis, outlining how targeted thermal chemistry can steer plastics toward single, high-value products. He then turned to graphitic carbon-nitride photocatalysts, showing that inverse-opal photonic crystals with hierarchical Bragg reflections enhance light harvesting and carrier separation, while warning that distorted current pathways and restricted mass-transfer inside the pore channels can offset these gains. To break this bottleneck, his team is now developing superlattice architectures whose atomic-level regularity should give directed charge transport and collection far superior to those of conventional porous frameworks.

After the lecture, faculty and students engaged in an in-depth discussion with Professor Wang on the rules governing product selectivity in plastic upcycling, the technical bottlenecks in fabricating hierarchical photocatalytic architectures, the advantages of molecular-level design in catalyst synthesis, and strategies for publishing in high-impact journals. The exchange ended in a warm, lively atmosphere; Professor Wang’s solid achievements and lucid research vision provided invaluable inspiration to everyone present.