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!

Takashi recently attained Chartered Scientist (CSci) status through the IOM3 for effective leadership throughout his research career so far. This was assessed by portfolio across five areas: (1) application of knowledge and understanding, (2) personal responsibility, (3) interpersonal skills, (4) professional practice and (5) professional standards. This achievement builds upon his recent recognition as a Fellow of Advance HE (FHEA) for his broad contributions to teaching and learning support across the university. Well done Takashi – the PAM team are very proud of you!

Congratulations to Bea who won the prize for Best Presentation in the Brief Encounters session of the Armourers and Brasiers’ Cambridge Forum on 20th June. She gave a 3 minute talk titled “Controlling Molecular Delivery by Squeezing Liquid Crystal Dispersions with Light”.

Bea receiving her prize from Professor David Knowles, CEO of the Henry Royce Institute.