Our paper entitled “Surface functionalisation significantly changes the physical and electronic properties of carbon nano-dots” has been accepted in the journal Nanoscale. Working jointly with the Galan group and researchers in Chemistry and Physics at the University of Bristol, we used an arsenal of analytical and spectroscopic techniques to explore the physical and electronic structure of a variety of glycan functionalised carbon nano-dots.  Carbon nano-dots are emerging as non-toxic fluorescent nanoparticles useful for biological applications such as targeting cancer cells or fluorescent labelling. Our studies reveal, counter to prior hypotheses, that the surface functionalisation does not always result in a homogenous corona surrounding the carbon dot core, and the choice of carbohydrate significantly affects the electronic structure of the surface CD states. The article can be found here.