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.”
£1.2M has been awarded to the Oliver group and US collaborator Prof Stephen Bradforth (University of Southern California) for a collaborative 3-year project entitled Quantum Coherence and Correlations in Condensed Phase Photochemical Reaction Dynamics. The international collaborative project is UK-led, and funding for studies at the University of Bristol are supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the US side is funded by the National Science Foundation.
The Oliver and Bradforth groups will study how important light-driven reactions key to photocatalysis, protein damage and drug design have spin-selective product yields that cannot be explained within a conventional classical framework. The applications of quantum information science are rapidly expanding beyond quantum computing, but the ramifications for solution phase chemical reactions remain largely unexplored. New multidimensional ultrafast experimental techniques will be designed to read out the developing spin-state and its entanglement at much faster timescales than have hitherto been possible from magnetic resonance experiments – looking critically at chemical phenomena through a new lens. The innovative experiments will correlate spin with both electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom, exploiting recent cutting-edge developments in short-pulse broadband deep-ultraviolet laser sources. Their discoveries will reveal how the quantum mechanical state imprinted by light maps through into specific distributions of products crucially determining the overall outcome of photochemical reaction and potentially laying the foundations for new high-value chemical synthetic products.
Congratulations to Olivia Hawkins for passing her PhD viva voce exam on 23rd July 2025. Her PhD examiners were Prof Vas Stavros (Birmingham) and Prof Andrew Orr-Ewing (Bristol). Her PhD thesis entitled “Ultrafast Dynamics of 1,6-Diphenyl-1,3,5-Hexatriene in Complex Environments” used an arsenal of different experimental techniques to probe how the excited state photochemical dynamics of a model short-chain polyene and important bioimaging dye, DPH, are strongly influenced by their environment- in liquids or inside polypeptide barrels.
The EU FET Open Boostcrop consortium, led by Prof Vas Stavros (University of Birmingham) were awarded a Faraday Horizon Prize by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) for “boosting crop growth using natural product and synthesis enabled solar harvesting.” RSC Faraday Horizon Prizes recognise significant recent novel discoveries or advances made in the area of physical chemistry by groups or teams.
The Boostcrop team was comprised of 6 EU and 2 UK institutions spanning academia (chemistry/biology) and industry (synthesis/agriculture), including Bristol colleagues Kerry Franklin and Chris Groves from Biological Sciences. Daniel Polak (former post-doc in the Oliver group now at Leicester), Mike Ashfold (Emeritus Professor) and Tom were all members of the Boostcrop team, and share part of the 2025 Faraday Horizon prize.
Prof Steve Bradforth (University of Southern California) and Tom have been jointly awarded one of eight Inaugural Benjamin Meaker annual awards by the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol. This annual award will allow for exchanges between the Oliver and Bradforth groups to develop stronger research links between their groups, focussing on the photophysical investigations of earth abundant photocatalysts.
Congratulations to Camilla and Caleb for the publication of their 2DES paper. The article was selected to feature on the front cover of the latest issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. The paper details our novel two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy experiment, which couples ultrashort time resolution (< 8 fs) and ultrabroadband (500-750 nm) wavelength resolution. Through the innovation of wavelength-dependent reference detection, we have greatly increased the sensitivity of the technique allowing for the study of samples at far lower concentrations than usual.
After a tour of Oceania, Camilla has rejoined the group as a post-doc working on the BBSRC funded sLoLa Circuits of Life project. She will utilise the world-class 2D electronic spectroscopy experiment she constructed as a PhD student to explore pigment-protein coupling in de novo heme containing proteins.
Congratulations to Camilla and Caleb of the acceptance of their two electronic spectroscopy (2DES) paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A! The paper details the coupling of an ultrabroadband laser source generated with a hollow-core fibre, compressed to 8 fs pulse duration, with a boxcars 2DES interferometer constructed from only conventional optics. The resulting ultra-broad bandwidth and high temporal resolution allow for superior spectral coverage of the typically broad molecular line shapes in the near-IR/visible region in room temperature solutions and the exploration of the excited state dynamics at the earliest time epoch in complex systems. For the first time in a degenerate broadband 2DES experiment, we demonstrate the implementation of full-wavelength reference detection to correct for wavelength-dependent laser intensity fluctuations. The net result is a 4–5x increased signal-to-noise, allowing for highly sensitive 2DES measurements, and the exploration of molecular vibronic transitions in a model system. This new platform paves the way for highly sensitive measurements of precious samples at lower than usual concentrations. The article is available to read online.
Congratulations to Meiyue Liu for winning a poster prize at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Annual Spectroscopy and Dynamics Group Meeting in January 2025! Her poster was entitled Time-Resolved Electronic and Vibrational Probes of Riboflavin Excited State Dynamics in Solution
The Oliver Research Group 