Congratulations to former PhD student and post-doc Dr Camilla Gajo for being awarded the 2026 PhD thesis prize by the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Spectroscopy and Dynamics Group. Her thesis was entitled “Unravelling Chromophore-Environment Interactions Using Ultrafast Multidimensional Spectroscopies.”
Welcome to Holly Mitchell, who joins as a TECS CDT student with Carmen Galan and Tom Oliver. She graduated with an MChem in Chemistry from the University of Reading in 2023, having spent her third year studying abroad at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her final-year project focused on the synthesis of novel photocleavable protecting groups for the photocontrolled release of glutamate molecules. Following graduation, she spent two years working at ATDBio (under Biotage) as an oligonucleotide chemist before leaving in 2025 to join the TECS CDT. She is working on the developing novel photoswitches targetting G-quadruplex DNA.
On Tuesday 7th July, a symposium on Quantum Spin Correlations in Photochemical Reaction Dynamics was held at the School of Chemistry, University of Bristol. The symposium brought together the leads of three thematically linked projects funded by a joint EPSRC-NSF call focusing on “Exploiting Quantum Information Science (QIS) in Chemistry”. The three talks focused on how spin states of molecules, including radical pairs, could be thought of within the terminology of QIS, or even their photochemistry exploited as QIS tools.
The symposium featured talks by Christiane Timmel (Oxford), Steve Bradforth (University of Southern California) and Alex Clark (Bristol) (pictured above), and was followed by a poster session. The symposium was chaired by Tom Oliver (Bristol).
The symposium was made possible through a Benjamin Meaker Annual Award from the University of Bristol’s International Development Team.
Congratulations to Jacob on the acceptance of our collaborative paper in JACS Au, developed together with Prof Guanglu Wu and colleagues at Jilin University. The paper shows how cucurbit[8]uril-confined chromophore dimers can be used to control dual emission by progressively restricting molecular motion, switching the dominant emission from short- to long-wavelength states while strongly enhancing fluorescence quantum yield. These results establish controlled supramolecular dynamics as a powerful strategy for designing programmable optoelectronic materials.
Welcome to Sanjoy Patra who has recently joined the Oliver group as part of the EPSRC-NSF Quantum Information Science grant, investigating spin-correlation and coherences. Sanjoy completed his MSc-PhD at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, under the supervision of Dr. Vivek Tiwari, where he focused on the development and optimisation of polarisation-controlled multidimensional electronic spectroscopy to study singlet fission and symmetry-breaking charge separation in molecular dyads. In his MSc, he also developed theoretical frameworks for formulating effective normal modes to describe vibronic effects in molecular dyads.
A new paper detailing the development and first application of a multi-octave continuum probe in ultrafast liquid-phase transient absorption spectroscopy has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The paper is available to read here. This work was undertaken at the University of Southern California in Steve Bradforth’s lab, and is the first paper to emerge from Tom’s sabbatical as part of a Leverhulme International Fellowship.
Well done to Caleb on his successful promotion to senior postdoctoral research associate. This promotion recognises his outstanding research achievements, contributions to teaching and leadership within the School of Chemistry, Oliver research group and EPSRC programme grant.
Congratulations to Mei, who was awarded a prize for one of the four best talks at the annual RSC Spectroscopy and Dynamics Group Meeting, held in Warwick. Her presentation, “Tracking photoinduced electron transfer in de novo designed proteins,” highlighted the latest progress we have made on the sLoLa Circuits of Life project.
Our new EPSRC-NSF grant has been featured on the University of Bristol’s news page, highlighting that Bristol was awarded 2 out of 8 of the international grants in this special call.
Welcome to Dr Alex Stuart, who joins the Oliver group as a postdoctoral research fellow working on the BBSRC-funded sLoLa Circuits of Life grant. She previously worked as a postdoc at the University of Sydney with Prof. Girish Lakhwani, where she used optical spectroscopy to study the photophysics of organic semiconductors for optoelectronic applications. Prior to this Alex received her PhD from the University of Adelaide with A/Prof. Tak Kee and A/Prof David Huang, primarily on singlet fission and the photochemistry of polyacenes.
Alex was recently awarded the Cornforth Medal by the Royal Australian Chemical Society for her outstanding PhD thesis. The national prize is annually awarded in Australia “for a thesis on chemical research, recognising outstanding achievement in Chemistry and to promote chemical communication.”
The Oliver Research Group 