John Dennis has been both a professor within the MOE Key Laboratory of Macromolecular Synthesis and Functionalization at Zhejiang University and the director of the Haina-Carbon Nanostructure Research Center, Yangtze Delta Region Institute of Tsinghua University since November 2020. He obtained his D.Phil. from University of Sussex (1993) conducting research into the then-newly available fullerenes under the supervision of Sir Harry Kroto, after which he had a series of research fellowships at the University of New South Wales (ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow), Nagoya University (JSPS Foreign Research Fellow) and the Hahn-Meitner Institute, Berlin (Humboldt Research Fellow). In 1999, he gained tenure as a lecturer within the Department of Chemistry at Queen Mary University of London and was in 2006 promoted to reader professor with a transfer to the Department of Physics at the same institution. He is a spectroscopist with research interests in fullerene-related materials, and lately, their application to organics electronics. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2005.