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!

Congratulations to Arad for winning the Best Poster Award at the RSC Solid-State Chemistry Group Christmas Meeting 2024. His poster, which presented his recently published work titled “Melt Alloying of Two-Dimensional Hybrid Perovskites: Composition-Dependence of Thermal and Optical Properties,” showcased his exciting research on the thermal and optical properties of meltable hybrid perovskite blends.

Congratulations to group members Michael Bennison, Abi Collins, Larissa Gomes Franca, Georgie Burgoyne Morris, and former group members Joshua Karlsson and Bethan Charles on their new publication in Materials Advances. In this paper through systematic structural tuning of a family of methacrylate copolymers, it was shown that triplet-triplet annihilation upconversion efficiency and mechanism of a standard chromophore pair can be controlled by the glass transition temperature of the host.

Methacrylate-based copolymers as tunable hosts for triplet–triplet annihilation upconversion

Michael J. Bennison, Abigail R. Collins, Larissa Gomes Franca, Georgina H. Burgoyne Morris, Niamh Willis-Fox, Ronan Daly, Joshua K. G. Karlsson, Bethan L. Charles, and  Rachel C. Evans, Mater. Adv., 2025, Advance Article. https://doi.org/10.1039/D4MA01221F

Congratulations to former group member Camille Blayo and current members Bea Jone and Mike Bennison on their new publication in Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry. Using azobenzene photo surfactants we show that the shape and size of micelles can affect the efficiency of the chemical reactions performed within them.

Size and Shape Matter for Micellar Catalysis using Light-Responsive Azobenzene Surfactants

Camille Blayo, Beatrice E. Jones, Michael J. Bennison, Rachel C. Evans*, Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, 2024, DOI: doi.org/10.1039/D4OB01587H

October was a month of regeneration for the PAM group.

Maggie Nelson (MPhil) and Tom Williamson (PhD) joined us for their postgraduate studies.

Dr Abi Collins returns to the group as a postdoctoral researcher working on photonic coatings for indoor solar cells.

Leah Belson and Ned Loveridge join us for their Part III projects

We also “adopted” several members from the Bennett group following Tom’s move to New Zealand: Celia Castillo Blas, Francesca Melle, Arad Lang, Chumei Ye, and Celia Chen joins on a more permanent basis to continue her PhD studies. Welcome all!