Rachel delivered a plenary lecture at JIF6 – the 6th Jornadas Ibericas de Fotoquímica meeting, which took place on the 12-14th September in the beautiful city of Aveiro, Portugal. The JIF meeting is held every two years and is organised jointly by the Portuguese and Spanish Interest Groups of their respective Chemical Societies. More information can be found here:

http://6jif.eventos.chemistry.pt

Congratulations to Camille whose paper entitled “Unlocking Structure-Self-Assembly Relationships in Cationic Azobenzene Photosurfactants” has been accepted for publication in Langmuir. This is the first paper from the Photosurfactants team (Camille, Judith and Elaine) and represents an exciting step for the group – We did organic chemistry! Great work team.

Thanks to ISIS Neutron and Muon Source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for the award off beam time to perform small-angle neutron scattering experiments.

Unlocking Structure-Self-Assembly Relationships in Cationic Azobenzene Photosurfactants, C. Blayo, J. E. Houston, S. M. King, R. C. Evans*, Langmuir, 2018, DOI: 10.1021/acs.langmuir.8b02109.

Rachel had the great opportunity to travel to Australia for the Macro 2018 conference in Cairns (http://www.macro18.org/speakers/invited-speakers/). Rachel was an invited speaker in the Energy, Optics and Optoelectronics symposium. It was an excellent conference and Rachel even got to see a humpback whale before heading home.

Rachel delivered an invited public talk at the Armourers and Brasier’s 2018 Cambridge Forum. Pictures from the event can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/143823243@N04/sets/72157695232041152

We welcome Benadetta Rigatelli to the lab for a research placement. Benedetta is an MSc student from the group of our collaborator Dr Gianmarco Griffini in Politecnico di Milano and will be undertaking measurements on her Luminescent Solar Concentrators.

A belated welcome to Lucy Prendeville from Trinity College Dublin to our lab. Lucy has been awarded an RSC undergraduate summer bursary to spend time with the group researching templated nanoparticles

Congratulations to James Kendall, Amelia Mitchell and Joanne Pham who have submitted their Part III (final year) research projects. James, Amelia and Joanne were the first Part III students to undertake their projects in the Photoactive Materials Chemistry lab in Cambridge and they all did an excellent job! James and Amelia are pictured below.

Congratulations to Elaine Kelly who was runner-up in the PhysChem category of the 2018 RSC Twitter conference.

For the past three years, the Royal Society of Chemistry has hosted a Twitter poster conference, inviting participants to submit posters on Twitter based on their research in the chemical sciences. This year, people from all across the globe participated in the Twitter poster conference, achieving 1,912 contributors, 6,715 Tweets, an audience of 2,019,127 and 10,267,097 total impressions!

Elaine’s poster on surface tension in photoactive surfactants can be seen below.

Dr Rachel Evans has been awarded the 2017 Young Researcher’s Medal by the RSC/SCI Macro Group UK for her research structure-property relationships in photoactive soft materials for energy harvesting. Rachel will be presented with the medal later on the the year at the Macro Group annual meeting. Thank you to all group members for their hard work.

This year has been one of immense change for the Evans Group, which has seen Rachel and the group split between two universities (and two countries!) for much of it.

The 1st of October 2017 marked the formal start of the new research group in Cambridge and we have had an exciting (and busy!) time setting up our new lab and welcoming new  members to the group.

There have been lots of good things happening but very little time to keep this website up to date, but hopefully this is starting to change, so keep coming back to see what we are up to.

In the meantime, a very belated welcome to the new members of the group:

Ilaria Meazzini submitted her PhD thesis in Dublin and moved to Cambridge to help us set up the lab – lifesaver!

Tom Southern and Morton Lyu joined as new PhD students.

Amelia Mitchell, James Kendall and Joanne Pham have joined the group for their MSci (Part III) projects.

Tom Parton has joined the group for his first mini-project as part of the NanoDTC (co-supervised by Prof. Jeremy Baumberg, Physics).

Welcome all!