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)

Congratulations to Kieran Richards who won second place in the Department’s postgraduate poster symposium. Well done Kieran! Kieran’s poster describes his work on the development of photoresponsive nanoparticles as Pickering emulsion stabilisers.

Congratulations to Oliver Nelson-Dunnett and Alex Zanre who carried out their Part III projects in the group – they both obtained First class honours in their final degrees! Well done both!

Rachel gave an invited talk at the CPE annual meeting in Imperial College London on the 10-11th June 2019 (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/191852/cpe-annual-symposium-2019/).

Tom Parton has one first prize in the Science in Innovation Unit (SIU) art in Science Oxford photo competition. Well done Tom!

Legend: The intense colours seen in this micrograph are created by cellulose nanocrystals, tiny slivers of carbohydrate extracted from cotton. Each individual nanocrystal is only 200 nanometres long; too small to be seen by eye, even under an optical microscope. However, under the right conditions these nanocrystals pack together into micron-scale screw-shaped structures which only reflect certain colours – in scientific terms, the colour reflected has a wavelength corresponding to the pitch (periodicity) of the screw. The image was taken on an inverted optical microscope in reflection mode with crossed polarisers.

Tom: In my research I study ways to use cellulose as a more sustainable source of colorants, instead of the dyes and plastics we currently use. The “tendrils” seen in the image are created when the cellulose crystals try to assemble around micelles (clusters of molecules called surfactants, which are the main component of soaps and detergents). I’m using these surfactants to move the cellulose crystals around and control their colour. This image is something of a failure, in scientific terms – I didn’t achieve very uniform colour – but I think it looks very beautiful nonetheless!

We have a 2 year PDRA vacancy in Polymer Materials available. Please see the opportunities page for further information.

Two ERC-funded PhD studentships are available in the Photoactive Materials group at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr Rachel Evans for an October 2019 start. Due to funding restriction these studentships are available to “home fees” students only.

Please see the “Opportunities” page for further information