Photokinetics

Mounir Maafi is a registered UN consultant/UNIDO international expert, an editor for three journals, and an active peer reviewer for more than 30 scientific journals. He has a versatile research experience that was facilitated by his chemical engineering background and a postgraduate diploma in spectroscopic methods for analyses of materials. His PhD (obtained from Paris 7 University), which focused on storage of sunlight energy in electro-polymers, preluded four postdoctoral positions (France, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) that were held in international institutions, including the Karolinska Institute. He has also been an academic in four European universities, where he mainly taught chemistry, pharmacy, pharmaceutical, and forensic students. Since he joined De Montfort University, he has successfully supervised to completion (as first supervisor) several national and externally funded international Ph.D. and Masters research students. He contributed oral and poster presentations at numerous conferences (where, for some, he was invited to deliver plenary presentations). The research programmes he was involved in required versatile skills in physical and analytical chemistry, mathematics and mathematical modelling of chemical systems, coding and simulation, numerical integration methods, and experimental design. The gathered expertise was pivotal to his research on photokinetics (i.e., kinetics of photoreactions) and actinometry (i.e., determination of the photon flux of a light source). His work was devoted to rationalising photokinetics along the generally established standards of kinetics. He has published in this area numerous papers in reputable (refereed) scientific journals. Almost each of these papers brought a new idea or conceptualisation to the field. Some of the important outcomes of his research included the discovery of the Φ-order kinetics, an unprecedented general explicit integrated rate-law equation to fit any trace of photo- and photothermal reactions, an explanation and solutions for the identifiability issues, mathematical procedures for kinetic elucidation (unravelling all reaction parameters), easy means to prove the variability of the quantum yield with irradiation wavelength, and handy actinometric methods (where he proposed a series of new actinometers). The predictive potential of the new explicit equation for many reaction situations has been proven experimentally and/or by numerically generated data. The research was based on a detailed mathematical framework combining the theoretical equations of photokinetics with mathematical simulations and experimental data. The rationale being that any new concept, formula, or procedure has to be tested by computer-generated data and, as much as possible, be confronted with experiment.  The shift of paradigm introduced by his research work in the subject of photokinetics contributes to a rationalisation of the subject and opens alternative avenues for further developments.