Congratulations to Bea whose work on the use of lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) for solar-energy storage has been published in JACS! In this work, we explore the solvent-driven self-assembly of azobenzene photosurfactants (AzoPS) into LLCs for molecular solar thermal energy storage (MOST) applications for the first time. Using a combination of in-situ differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) with small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), we were able to unpick the structure-photoswitch-energy storage relationships in these materials, paving the way for accelerated design of similar, amphiphilic systems for future MOST technologies.

Many thanks to all the collaborators who contributed to the success of this project: Zhihang Wang, Martijn Zwijnenburg, Charlotte Edwards-Gayle, Kasper Moth-Poulsen and Nathan Cowieson.

You can read the paper here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.5c09267

In July, the 17th International conference on materials chemistry (MC17) was held in Edinburgh, with PAM group members contributing in numerous ways.

Massive congratulations to MPhil student Maggie Nelson for winning the prize for Best Poster at the Armourers & Brasiers Forum held in Cambridge in June! Great work Maggie!

In June, the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy held its annual Postgraduate Seminar and Poster Day. PAM Group members Tom, Maggie and Ziqiong all presented posters on their work, while Celia gave a talk on her PhD research so far.

Special congratulations to Maggie and Ziqiong, who both received prizes for their excellent posters!

We are delighted to announce that the recent group paper, “Methacrylate-based copolymers as tunable hosts for triplet-triplet annihilation upconversion”, published in Materials Advances in January this year, has been selected for inclusion in the 2025 Popular Advances collection. This collection showcases articles which have been very well received by the community. The collection can be found here: Materials Advances Popular Advances Collection 2025.

Congratulations to group members Mike, Larissa, and Georgie, and former group members Abi, Joshua, and Bethan for all of their hard work on this paper!

Congratulations to Georgie Burgoyne Morris, whose review paper on self-healing papers for optical and photoactive applications has been published in Annual Review of Materials Research: her first paper as first author! Congratulations also to undergraduate student Leah Belson, whose Part II literature review formed an invaluable contribution to this work.

The paper is currently available as a Review in Advance, and will be published in the 2025 volume of Annual Review of Materials in July.

Self-Healing Polymers for Optical and Photoactive Systems

Georgina H. Burgoyne Morris, Leah N. Belson and Rachel C. Evans*, Annual Review of Materials Research, 2025, 55, Review In Advance

On Saturday 22nd March, the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy once again opened its doors to the public for Cambridge Festival 2025! The PAM group showed off our new outreach toolkit, developed through our EnLighten project, which was funded by the Royal Society of Chemistry Outreach Fund. Members of the public had great fun learning about liquid crystals and luminescent solar concentrators!

Congratulations to Georgie and Bea for all their hard work leading the EnLighten project, and to everyone involved with the Festival this year!

Congratulations to former group member Kieran Richards whose work, exploring the use of the circle-Hough transform for the analysis of Pickering emulsions, has been published in Soft Matter. Software titled ‘Hough Scan’ was produced to help identify these circular objects in microscopy images, and can be found here.

Computer Vision for High-Throughput Analysis of Pickering Emulsions

Kieran D. Richards*, Ella Comish and Rachel C. Evans*, Soft Matter, 2025, 21, 2339 – 2348.

In January, we said goodbye to Dr Abigail Collins as she left for a new job at Sagentia Innovation. Abi completed her PhD in the group before returning as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in October. She will be missed but we wish her the very best of luck in this new endeavour!