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.
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”.
