Congratulations to Larissa and co-authors on their recent review article discussing the mechanisms for recycling triplet excited states.

You can read the article here: Exploring the Versatile Uses of Triplet States: Working Principles, Limitations, and Recent Progress in Phosphorescence, TADF, and TTA

Congratulations to Bea Jones whose work on light-responsive liquid crystals has been published in JACS! In this collaboration with Imperial College, London (Matthew Fuchter and Jake Greenfield), we use arylazopyrazole surfactants to form lyotropic liquid crystals which show a hexagonal-to-cubic phase change on irradiation with UV light. This forms a structural continuity in the phase, which we use to control gas diffusion using light. 

You can read the paper here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.4c02709

Congratulations to Zhihang who delivered his first invited talk at the 2024 Functional Photoswitches for Energy Storage and Beyond conference in Barcelona last week! Well done to Bea who also gave a contributed talk on her research.

Congratulations to Abi whose work on solid-state triplet-triplane annihilation upconversion has recently bee published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

Abi also recently submitted her thesis – so double celebrations all around!

You can read all all about it here: Ambient solid-state triplet–triplet annihilation upconversion in ureasil organic–inorganic hybrid hosts

In April, Larissa presented her invited talk on photon conversion materials at the 4th Conference on Properties, Design, and Applications of Upconversion Nanomaterials (UPCON 2024) in Montreal. Her talk, titled “Triplet-Triplet Annihilation Upconversion in Hybrid Polymers for Imaging and Energy Technologies,” highlighted the group’s recent research. The conference coincided with a total solar eclipse, making the event even more special. “We thank the organizing committee for this incredible opportunity and for organizing such an exciting conference!”

The group recently took part in the Cambridge Festival, where they held a demonstration stall and interactive craft activity for members of the general public. The event forms part of a wider outreach project, EnLighten, where we are creating a reuseable demonstration toolkit exploring photoactive materials for multiple events. 

Congratulations to Georgie and Bea for leading a successful grant application to the Royal Society of Chemistry Outreach fund to support this project! 

Congratulations to Dr Junxin Wang, whose work on electrochromic platform capable or visible and NIR light modulation has been published in Chemical Engineering Journal.

The PAM group has been awarded funding from Cambridge Zero & the Decarbonisation Network through the Living Labs scheme to advance our lab sustainability goals.

Through LabSENSE we will develop a real-time dashboard to monitor energy, water and chemical consumption and waste production in our labs. This will allow us to quantitatively evaluate any actions we implement based on this data so that we can ensure our goals are being met. We aim to make LabSENSE fully open-access so that other labs across the university will be able to roll it out once developed. The project is led by Dr Mike Bennison & Prof. Rachel Evans, with key development contributions by Dr Takashi Lawson, Dr Zhihang Wang and Jack Avery. All members of the PAM team will be involved in implementing data monitoring.

Scope of the call: “Cambridge Zero and the Decarbonisation Network are working together to fund up to four small Living Lab demonstrator projects which should be applicable to the University of Cambridge’s estate and operations. Projects should aim to use innovative research-based approaches to explore practical decarbonisation and sustainability. We are looking for Living Lab proposals that can demonstrate a benefit and positive impact to buildings and/or operations and must be applicable to the University estate in some way.”

Huge congratulations to Larissa who has recently been awarded a prestigious 3-year 1851 Research Fellowship in Science or Engineering for 2022 from the Royal Commission (https://royalcommission1851.org/fellowships/research-fellowships). The project will be developed in the Photoactive Materials research group and will provide Larissa with the opportunity to undertake her first independent research project. The project will focus on the exploration of stimuli-responsive liquid crystal host materials for energy upconversion systems. We look forward to seeing all the exciting results!