Our People

Shane Telfer

Shane Telfer is Professor of Chemistry at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. He completed his BSc(Hons) and PhD in Chemistry at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. His research focuses on metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and porous materials for applications in separation and catalysis. Since 2007, he has been a Principal Investigator with the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology
Professor Telfer has published over 130 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, including Nature titles, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Angewandte Chemie. His work has attracted more than $8M in research funding, including five Marsden Fund grants as a principal investigator. He chaired MOF2018, the sixth International Conference on Metal–Organic Frameworks, held in Auckland in 2018. In 2012, he was a Fulbright Fellow at UC Berkeley.
In recognition of his contributions, he has received numerous awards, including the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry Prize for Excellence in Chemical Research (2015), the NZIC Prize for Industrial and Applied Chemistry (2024), Massey University’s Individual Research Medal (2021), and the Dalton Horizon Prize as part of the Pioneers in Hybrid Glass Research team (2025). He also appears on the Stanford/Elsevier list of the world’s top 2% of researchers, both for career-long and recent influence.
Beyond academia, Professor Telfer is founder and CEO of Captivate Technology, which is commercialising porous materials for carbon dioxide capture from flue gases.