Rachel and Georgie both gave talks at the 50th IUPAC Macro Congress at the University of Warwick this week. This is the leading conference in polymer chemistry and attracted 1200 delegates! Great fun had by all.
We recently welcomed Tom Williamson to the group to carry our research on templated polymer lattice architectures for radiative cooling for his midi (Masters) project as part of the NanoDTC programme. The project is co-supervised by Prof. Louise Hirst. Welcome Tom!
Rachel has been promoted to Professor (grade 12)/Chair in Materials Chemistry in the latest Academic Career Pathways scheme. She thanks the fantastic Photoactive Materials group (past & present), great collaborators and colleagues, and of course, the supportive referees!
Congratulations to Dr Takashi Lawson who was recently awarded the Armourers & Brasiers postdoctoral prize (jointly with Dr Nicole Church from the Rolls Royce group).
The results were announced at the annual Armourers and Brasiers’ Cambridge Forum (18th June 2024), where PhD student Georgie Burgoyne Morris also gave a Brief Encounters talk on her research.
ongratulations to Abigail Collins on passing her PhD viva! Many thanks to Prof. Libby Gibson from Newcastle University and Prof. Tijmen Euser (Department of Physics) for examining duties.
Abi has been doing some excellent work on the design of solid-state hosts for photon upconverters to improve integration with devices. You can read more about it in her recent publications (below), with more on the way!
Ambient solid-state triplet–triplet annihilation upconversion in ureasil organic–inorganic hybrid hosts Abigail R. Collins, Bolong Zhang, Michael J. Bennison and Rachel C. Evans*, Journal of Materials Chemistry C, 2024, 12, 6310-6318.
Organic Polymer Hosts for Triplet−Triplet Annihilation Upconversion Systems, Michael J. Bennison, Abigail C. Collins, Bolong Zhang and Rachel C. Evans*, Macromolecules, 2021, 54, 5287-5303. Front cover.
Photoactive organic-inorganic hybrid polymer waveguides for optical device technologies. Abigail R. Collins, Thomas J. F. Southern, Guangpeng Lyu, Michael J. Bennison and Rachel C. Evans*, Proc. SPIE 11367, Photosensitive Materials and their Applications, 113670Y (1 April 2020); doi: 10.1117/12.2564510.
Congratulations to Nell and Takashi, who are joint first authors on our new publication in ACS Applied Polymer Materials in which we do a deep dive into understanding how the interaction between photoinitators and fluorophores affects the rate of photopolymerisation. This type of reaction has important diverse applications from 3D/4D printing to the design of optical components so we were delighted that our paper was selected as an ACS Editor’s choice due to it’s wide-reaching potential impact.
The study was funded by an EPSRC New Horizons grant and the European Research Council CoG project SPECTRACON.
This is the first in a series of forthcoming publications arising from a fruitful and fun collaboration with Prof Kalai Saravanamuttu and Dr Kathryn Benincasa at McMaster University, Canada. Thanks also to Dr Andrew Prentice for DFT calculations to support our experimental studies.
Interplay of Luminophores and Photoinitiators during Synthesis of Bulk and Patterned Luminescent Photopolymer Blends
Helen Tunstall-García, Takashi Lawson, Kathryn A. Benincasa, Andrew W. Prentice, Kalaichelvi Saravanamuttu, and Rachel C. Evans*
ACS Appl. Polym. Mater. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1021/acsapm.4c00484
In May, Georgie presented at the Sustainable Tech event organised as part of the Pint of Science festival in Cambridge. This was one of many events across and beyond the UK in which scientists present cutting-edge research to general audiences in pubs, aiming to widen participation and engagement.
Georgie’s talk explained how spectral conversion can be used to harvest more of the solar spectrum. She found it a great opportunity to talk about science in a new context and learn how to explain the group’s research in an engaging and entertaining way.
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.
Photoactive Materials Group 