Sustainable Materials for Energy Technologies
Last Friday 8th December, it took place the 2nd MRI Christmas Symposium at QMUL. We had great talks given by PhD students and PDRA from different Schools at QMUL, part of the Materials Research Institute. Below you can see the programme. We look forward to the next MRI Symposium which will take place next Spring.
Below some pictures with the winners of the best poster and best talk of this year.
Welcome Qian! Qian has just started her PhD in our group with a CSC studentship. She will be developing photocatalyst materials for decomposition of pollutants in air and water, and study the effect the microstructure has on their performance. You can learn more about Qian here.
Last Friday, 13th October 2017, at QMUL we held the First Symposium of the QMUL-UCL London Energy Materials & Devices. I would like to thank you all for participating. The quality of the talks was outstanding and highlighted the excellent contribution to the field of materials for energy devices our research groups are making. Next Symposium will be organised at UCL, and hopefully we will witness numerous presentations fruit of joint collaborative research between both institutions.
Welcome Syzmon! Szymon has just started his PhD in our group. We are very happy he has joined us and very soon he will be hands-on in the lab doing great science. His PhD is part of the EPSRC First Grant EP/P031323/1 Bi-ECAT: Bifunctional Hybrid Electrocatalysts for Oxygen Evolution and Reduction Reactions. Learn more about him and his project here.
Dr A. Belen Jorge has been awarded with the prestigious EPSRC First Grant, starting in September 2017. Her proposal to develop new bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts was ranked first by the panel met the 25th April 2017. This is fantastic news! A new PhD student starting in October will design new composites combining N-doped C and transition metal oxide perovskites. In situ Raman-Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy studies will be conducted in collaboration with LISE, Universite de Pierre et Marie Curie (Sorbonne, Paris), and stability tests and scale-up strategies are envisaged with our industry partners, ITM-Power and PV3 Technologies Ltd. With our other academic partner, UCL, specifically, the Electrochemical Innovation Lab, led by Prof. Dan Brett and Dr. Paul Shearing, we will looking into 3D-connectivity of the components (N-doped C and perovskites), but also porosity and degradation tests.
From the 11th to 14th July we participated in the 9th International Conference on Advanced Materials ROCAM 2017 held in Bucharest http://rocam.unibuc.ro/rocam2017/
We also had time to do some sightseeing and enjoy such a beautiful city.
The MRI Spring Symposium was held on 31 May 2017 and featured excellent talks and posters from PhD students from the Materials Research Institute as well as an invited talk from Professor James Durrant FRS from Imperial College London. The Best Poster Prize of £100, kindly sponsored by Specac, was awarded to Alex Cresswell-Boyes from SMD for his poster on “Approaches to 3D printing of teeth from X-ray microtomography”. The Best Talk Prize of £150, kindly sponsored by Shimadzu, was awarded to Ying Liu from SPA for her talk on “Structure and electronic properties of CdSe magic size cluster”, while Suzan Aksakal from SEMS was awarded the runner-up prize of £50 also sponsored by Shimadzu for her talk on “Expanding the scope of thioacrylate monomers”.
Gulnara Naghiyeva and Han Meng attended their first conference this week (Tuesday 28th-Wednesday 29th March 2017) in Abingdon, the Early Career Research Conference http://stfcbatteries.org/stfc-early-career-researchers-conference-2017
This year the event was organised by Dina Ibrahim from UCL, and it was a great success. See if you can spot Gulnara and Han in the picture!
Dr Ana Jorge Sobrido and Prof Magda Titirici visited the NPU facilities, in Xi’an (10th to 19th April) to foster collaborations in the field of energy materials. QMUL and NPU have recently launched a Joint Educational Institute (JEI) tocreate a broad partnership in providing transnational university education in the field of Engineering Materials: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/177906.html
The JEI will in the first instance recruit students to two undergraduate programmes, BEng Polymer Materials Science and Engineering as well as BEng Materials Science and Engineering, from September 2017. More information about the programmes can be found here.
Below some pictures of Dr Ana Jorge Sobrido during her visit to a high school in Xi’an where she presented the JEI to the students.
On the 12th May 2017, Friday Magda Titirici’s and Ana Belen Jorge’s groups went together to Eastbourne, and hiked for over 18 km the Seven Sisters Cliffs. We were exhausted in the end, but it was good fun! And good exercise, too! We ended the journey with a great fish meal near Brighton pier. Below some pictures!
