Congratulations to Camille Blayo, who submitted his PhD thesis on Friday. Camille has been holding the fort as the final student finishing in Trinity College Dublin, so this marks the end of an era!

Congratulations also to Barry McKenna, who graduated on Friday. Since completing his PhD in the group, Barry has recently started working for Sanofi Genzyme and an Analytical Chemist.

Our paper with Rute Ferreira and collaborators in the Universidade de Aveiro on blue-light amplifying organic–inorganic hybrids for visible light communications has been published in ACS Omega.

Flexible Optical Amplifier for Visible Light Communications Based on Organic-Inorganic Hybrids
A. Bastos, B. McKenna, M. Lima, P. André, L. D. Carlos, R. C. Evans and R. A. S. Ferreira*
ACS Omega, 2018, 3, 13772-13781.

Members of the group travelled to Swansea to participate in the Early Career Members meeting of the RSC Photophysics and Photochemistry Group (http://www.rsc.org/events/detail/33561/rsc-photochemistry-group-early-career-members-meeting) (20-21st September 2018).

Elaine presented a talk on her work on In-situ UV/Vis and SANS experiments on photo switchable wormlike micelles and Morton and Benedetta presented posters on their work on luminescent solar concentrators. As Chair of the RSC PPG, Rachel had the privilege to present the RSC Marlow Award to Dr Artem Bakulin from Imperial College London. Well done all!

Rachel has been admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in recognition of the impact of her research and leadership in the general field of Chemistry.

Rachel has been elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3).

More information on the IOM# can be found here: http://www.iom3.org/about-iom3

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.