Other U of T chemists who have won the prize include Nobel laureate John Polanyi, who won in 1965, and last year's winner, Lewis Kay. Manners's research is focussed at the interface of inorganic and polymer chemistry.
Most polymer chemists work on organic polymers, using chains of carbon atoms to build molecules.
With his unique perspective as an inorganic chemist, Manners is one of the few people in the world who has been successful in making new classes of polymers based on inorganic elements. A particularly important discovery in the early 1990s was a method for making polymers that have metal atoms in their backbone. This work has firmly established him as an international leader in the synthetic polymer field. The polymers that Manners and his group create are specialty materials that make up a small but crucial part of an object or device. On a satellite, for example, a coating of metal-containing polymer can dissipate an electric charge so there is basically no charge buildup in a stream of high energy radiation.