2022 EPSRC Doctoral Fellowships
We are extremely pleased to announce that after a competitive interview process in September, two doctoral fellowships have been awarded.
Find out more about the fellows below:
Tom studied Natural Sciences at University College London, including a year of study at the California Institute of Technology, before he came to Cambridge as a student on the EPSRC CDT in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NanoDTC)
Supervised by Professor Silvia Vignolini in the Bio-inspired Photonics group, Department of Chemistry, the overarching aim of his PhD was to make colourful materials from more sustainable sources. One way to achieve this goal is by producing nanostructured films made from cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) which are rod-shaped nanoparticles extracted from natural cellulose such as cotton or wood. When suspended in water, they spontaneously assemble into a cholesteric liquid crystal phase, in which the CNCs are locally aligned with each other while the overall structure has a helix-like structure with a left-handed twist. This twisted configuration can be preserved as the sample dries to produce solid cellulose films with a periodic nanostructure. Although cellulose is non-absorbing, the film reflects light in a narrow wavelength range due to constructive interference.
For the Doctoral Fellowship, Tom plans to develop a high-throughput protocol to characterise the morphology of CNCs and other bio-derived nanoparticles, which should greatly speed up data acquisition. Alongside this work, he will explore ways to generate "chiral dopant" particles from scratch by induced aggregation of CNCs. The ultimate goal would be to synthesise chiral dopants of opposite handedness to those that we find naturally in CNC suspensions, which would enable the creation of a right-handed cholesteric structure. By combining left- and right-handed structures, we would be able to produce CNC films that reflect up to 100% of incident light at a given wavelength, offering extremely vibrant colour.
Kyle completed his undergraduate degree in Nanoscience at Trinity College Dublin, including six months at Caltech and Stanford, before starting his EPSRC DTP PhD with Professor Samuel Stranks in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and Physics.
The primary research goal of his PhD project was to enable a sustainable future based on equitably produced electricity where energy security and environmental damage associated with power generation are issues of the past. His work focused on the most promising candidate for the next generation of solar panels and lighting, metal-halide perovskites. These materials improve efficiency whilst involving low-cost deposition techniques. Importantly, utilising low-cost production techniques dramatically reduces the up-front capital cost of a manufacturing facility, making perovskites strong candidates for powering the developing world.
For the Doctoral Fellowship, Kyle plans to develop a voltage dependent photoluminescence mapping technique to map local variations in photovoltaic performance across orders of magnitude of length scales, from whole device areas to ~100s of nanometre lengths scale. By carrying out this mapping technique it will track performance and degradation losses on the nanoscale and can help inform what is degrading at each point. The goal is to use these microscopic insights to rationally improve the next generation of solar cells.
We wish Tom and Kyle every success with their fellowship projects and for their future careers.