Dr Mengfan Guo, Goldsmiths’ Early Career Research Fellow at Churchill College, has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship, one of the UK’s most competitive and respected awards for outstanding early-career researchers.
Dr Guo will take up the Fellowship in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy from 1 October 2026. The eight-year award will support his research into polar materials and electrocaloric cooling, helping to advance more energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable cooling technologies.
The Royal Society University Research Fellowship provides long-term support for researchers with the potential to become leaders in their fields, enabling them to establish ambitious independent research programmes and pursue innovative lines of enquiry.
Dr Guo’s research focuses on polar materials, which contain microscopic electric dipoles – tiny pairs of positive and negative charges whose arrangement can give rise to unusual electrical, mechanical and thermal properties. His Fellowship will explore the electrocaloric effect, a phenomenon in which certain materials heat up or cool down when an electric field is applied or removed.
Explaining the research, Dr Guo said:
“Polar materials contain tiny electric dipoles. The way these dipoles arrange themselves and how their arrangement changes electrically can give the material interesting properties. My new research fellowship focuses particularly on the electrocaloric effect, which offers a possible route to cooling without the green-gas refrigerants and mechanical compressors used in conventional refrigerators and air-conditioning systems.”
In the longer term, electrocaloric materials could contribute to compact, energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable cooling technologies. Potential applications include thermal management for electronics, batteries and medical devices, as well as domestic refrigeration and air conditioning.
A particular focus of Dr Guo’s work is on soft polar materials, including ferroelectric polymers. Because their molecular structures can reorganise in different ways, they offer opportunities to engineer new patterns of polarisation and potentially achieve larger thermal changes for future cooling applications.
While promising, significant challenges remain before electrocaloric materials can be translated into practical technologies. Over the course of the Fellowship, Dr Guo and his team will investigate both fundamental scientific questions and the technological challenges that must be overcome to bring these materials closer to real-world use.
The Fellowship will support the creation of an independent research programme and team, including PhD students, specialist experimental equipment, materials preparation and collaborations with researchers in the UK and internationally. A major strand of the research will focus on developing new ways to characterise polar materials and understand the microscopic origins of their thermal response.
Dr Guo studied Materials Science and Engineering at Tsinghua University, where he completed both his undergraduate degree and PhD. During his doctoral research, he investigated ferroelectric polymers and discovered complex polarisation structures, including vortex-like patterns known as topological textures.
He moved to Cambridge in 2023 as a Royal Society Newton International Fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy before becoming a Goldsmiths’ Early Career Research Fellow at Churchill College. His work in Cambridge has expanded from the study of fundamental polar structures to their potential application in electrocaloric cooling, including recent research demonstrating useful cooling effects across room temperature.
The award represents a major milestone in Dr Guo’s career and follows a period of rapid development as an independent researcher at Churchill.
Reflecting on the award, Dr Guo said:
“I am deeply honoured to receive the Royal Society University Research Fellowship. It gives me the freedom to think boldly, build a new research team from the ground up, and pursue ideas that would be difficult to realise. I am extremely grateful to the colleagues, mentors and College community who have supported me, and I cannot wait to begin this next chapter at Cambridge!”
Dr Guo also shared the role Churchill College has played in supporting his academic journey:
“Churchill’s strong tradition in science, engineering and technology was naturally very attractive to me. It also has the considerable practical advantage of being the closest College to my Department in West Cambridge, so moving between College life and the laboratory is unusually easy. The green space in and around Churchill makes that short journey especially enjoyable.
“More importantly, Churchill brings together people from an extraordinary range of disciplines. Conversations over dinner or at College events often take me well beyond my own research area and remind me that scientific ideas can be enriched by perspectives from history, philosophy, policy and many other fields.
“My Goldsmiths’ Early Career Research Fellowship at Churchill has been especially meaningful to me. It is a dedicated endowment supporting an early career researcher in Materials Science, so it felt closely connected both to my discipline and to the stage I had reached in my career. It gave me practical support and intellectual space to develop an independent research programme and prepare for the next step.”
The award represents the next step in Dr Guo’s academic career, providing the long-term support needed to build an independent research group and advance his research into sustainable cooling technologies.