Wan Jefrey Basirun graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree (honors) in Chemistry in 1991. He later pursued a postgraduate degree in the University of Southampton and graduated with a PhD in Industrial Chemistry in 1997. Since 1997, he has been a member of the teaching staff in the department of Chemistry in University Malaya and teaches Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. His research focus is into Physical Chemistry, Electrochemistry, Material Science, Nanotechnology, and supervised 32 PhDs and 7 MSc students into completion and authored and co-authored more than 390 papers indexed in ISI Web of Science and 7 book chapters, with a Web of Science H-Index of 55 in 2025. Among the international awards and recognition, he received was: (i). recognized as top 1% Analytical Chemist by the Japan Society of Analytical Chemistry in 2019 (ii). Outstanding Reviewer in more than 60 journals published by Elsevier, Royal Society of Chemistry UK (RSC), Wiley, Springer, American Chemical Society (ACS), Taylor and Francis and World Scientific, recognized as top 1% global Peer Reviewer 2019 by Clarivate Analytics, (iii). recognized as top 2% scientist in the world from 2020 to 2025.
Among his administrative duties are as Deputy Director for Institute of Nanotechnology and Catalysis Research (NanoCat), University Malaya since 2018, as Editor in Chief of Malaysian Journal of Science (indexed by Scopus) 2020 – March 2021, and chairman of viva-voce for PhD students from Department of Chemistry, and various committee chairperson in NanoCat. Since beginning his research career in 1997, he has secured research grant more than Malaysian Ringgit 2 million from the ministry of higher education Malaysia as a principal researcher and co-researcher to carry out fundamental and applied research in various fields of research. He was seconded to the Microelectronics Institute of Malaysia (MIMOS) from 2008-2011 and helped MIMOS to file 9 patents with his credit.
He was also an external examiner for more than 10 PhD candidates from foreign universities in Australia, Egypt, Pakistan and India. He has industrial collaborations with local industries and is the guest editor for Energy Electrochemistry journal published by MDPI. In the age of climate change and global warming where the drive towards hydrogen energy is becoming more intensified, he forged industrial collaboration with HydrogenTech, a local company looking to recycle sodium metaborate into sodium borohydride as a solid hydrogen storage material, where a patent (PI2024006169, A Method for Synthesizing Sodium Borohydride by Utilizing Recycled Sodium Metaborate) was filed with the industrial collaborator.
He also conducts yearly workshops on electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) with the collaboration of Metrohm Sdn. Bhd. a technique which he has also utilized widely in his research projects. He is the Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in United Kingdom since 2023, Fellow of the International Association of Advanced Materials (IAAM) in Sweden since 2023 and was awarded scientist medal from IAAM in 2023 for his work in experimental electrochemistry and was elected as Fellow of the Akademi Sains Malaysia (ASM) since 2023.
