Rachel Evans gives an invited talk on the groups’ work on luminescent solar devices at the IOP Physical Aspects of Polymer Science Conference, University of Lincoln (11-13th September, 2019) http://paps19.iopconfs.org/home

Rachel Evans gave a plenary talk at the Recent Appointees in Polymer Science meeting (RAPS19) at the University of Leeds (4-6th September).

Congratulations to current and former group members Elaine and Judith whose paper entitled “Multimodal control of liquid crystalline mesophases from surfactants with photoswitchable tails” has been accepted for publication in Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

This work reports a family of neutral azobenzene photosurfactants which, using small-angle X-ray scattering and polarised optical microscopy, are shown to form a variety of lyotropic liquid crystal mesophases depending on the surfactant structure and solution temperature and concentration. Photoisomerisation of the surfactant with UV light leads to the destruction of the liquid crystalline phase. This process is reversible, allowing the liquid crystalline phases to be selectively created and destroyed on-demand.

Thanks to Diamond Light Source for time on Beamline B21 to perform small-angle X-ray scattering experiments.

Multimodal control of liquid crystalline mesophases from surfactants with photoswitchable tails, J. E. Houston, E. A. Kelly, Margarita Kruteva, Kiriaki Chrissopoulou, Nathan Cowieson, R. C. Evans*, J. Mater. Chem. C, 2019, DOI: 10.1039/C9TC04079J

Rachel gives invited talk on the group’s work on Luminescent Solar Devices at the MAF2019 conference in La Jolla, California.

She also will give two contributed talks on stimuli-responsive fluids and aggregation-induced emission LSCs at the ACS Fall meeting in San Diego, California

We are delighted to welcome Dr Michael Bennison to the group.

Mike, whose background is in both synthetic and polymer chemistry, will be working with the team on the SPECTRACON project funded by the ERC, looking at ways to develop new spectral conversion materials based on organic-inorganic hybrid polymers.

Members of the group travelled to Birmingham to present their work at
Materials Chemistry 14, organised by the RSC.

Rachel gave a keynote talk on the Bottom-Up Design of Integrated
Spectral Conversion Materials for Luminescent Solar Devices. Morton also
presented a poster on this subject. Tom Parton, Elaine and Kieran
presented posters on photoresponsive materials, and Tom Southern
presented a poster on hierarchically porous membranes.

Congratulations to Tom Southern who won a poster prize at the MacroGroup UK Young Researcher’s meeting held at the University of Kent on 1^st-2^nd July (https://macrogroup.org.uk/2019/04/30/2019-young-researchers-meeting/).

Tom’s poster described his work on a dual-template method to prepare hierarchically porous polymer films. Well done Tom!!

Congratulations to Dr Camille Blayo who became the 6^th PhD student to graduate from the group and the last one to graduate from Trinity College Dublin. The sun was shining and Camille had a great day celebrating!

We welcome back Oliver Nelson-Dunnett who will spend some time with us over the summer continuing his work on energy transfer in microporous polymers (PIMs).

Rachel was Co-Chair (with Prof. Alberto Credi) of the inaugural UK-Italy Photochemistry meeting jointly hosted by the RSC Photophysics & Photochemistry Group (PPG) and the Gruppo Italiano di Fotochimica (GIF) (http://www.fotochimica.org). The meeting took place on the beautiful islands of Lipari, one of the Aeolian islands, and attracted over 80 participants. Rachel attended the meeting, along with other members of the PPG committee, and Morton Lyu presented his work on luminescent solar concentrators as a poster.

The RSC & GIF are extremely grateful to the local organising committee, particularly Prof. Fausto Puntiero, who organised a fantastic meeting and have set the bar extremely high for the reciprocal meeting in 2021!

(L-R) Rachel Evans (Chair, PPG), Bob Edkins (Secretary, PPG), Paul Scattergood (PPG committee), Olof Johansson (Treasurer, PPG), Victoria Porley (PhD student, Edinburgh), Colin Martin (Researcher, Nara)