Kim Jelfs

Jelfs studied chemistry at University College London.^[1] For her final year project, Jelfs worked at the Royal Institution.^[2] She earned her PhD in 2010, working with Ben Slater on modelling the growth of zeolitic materials.^[2][3]

After completing her PhD Jelfs joined the University of Barcelona, working with Stefan Bromley. She moved to the University of Liverpool, working as a postdoctoral researcher with Matthew Rosseinsky and Andrew Ian Cooper.^[2] At the University of Liverpool Jelfs characterised the structure of porous materials.^[2] She was funded by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Programme Grant.^[4][5]

In 2013 she joined Imperial College London as a Royal Society University Research Fellow.^[1] In 2015 she was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant, which provides €1.5 million funding for five years of materials discovery.^[6][7][8] Her research will consider porous molecules, organic small molecules and polymers.^[8] She uses computational models to predict the relationships between structure and properties.^[9] The models can also be used to predict the properties of amorphous frameworks and porous molecules.^[9] Her group identified the 20 most probable topologies for porous cage molecules, which can be synthesised through dynamic covalent chemistry.^[10]

In 2018 Jelfs was awarded the Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry.^[2] She was also awarded an Imperial College London President's Award for Outstanding Early Career Research.^[11][12] In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Chemistry.^[13] In 2025, Jelfs was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry's Corday-Morgan Prize^[14].