Congratulations to Olivia Hawkins for winning one of the poster prizes at the RSC’s Spectroscopy and Dynamics Annual Group Meeting held virtually on Zoom (11-12th January 2021). Her poster was entitled “Investigating the fluorescence properties of Diphenylhexatriene in different environments”
Congratulations to Giordano who won (alongside Georgia Thornton in Andrew Orr-Ewing’s group at Bristol) one of the 6 prizes awarded for best 3 minute video challenge at the RSC’s Photochemistry and Photophysics Annual Meeting hosted online. Giordano presented his study examining FRET between quantum dots and bacterial reaction centres in biohybrid nanoconjugates- a project that we have worked in collaboration with Dr Mike Jones (Biochemistry, Bristol). The video can be viewed here.
Welcome to new graduate students Olivia and Camilla, who have just joined the Oliver group. Camilla and Olivia will use ultrafast spectroscopies to investigate the dynamics of bilin and chlorin pigments in solution and protein.
Congratulations to Dr Somen Mondal for the award of a prestigious Newton International Fellowship, to be hosted in the Oliver group at the University of Bristol. Somen will start his new position in March 2021.
Fabiola gave an excellent and animated talk on zoom to the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials Annual conference detailing her fascinating discovery of dynamic iridescence in Phyllagathis rotundifolia.
Congratulations to Victoria Taylor and Marta Duchi for passing their (remote) PhD vivas during UK lockdown! Marta is now a post-doc with Peter Hamm in Zurich, and Victoria will start a post-doc with Ralph Ernstorfer in September.
Tom’s prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship has been renewed for a further 3 years. Tom was originally awarded his prestigious fellowship in 2015, and made the offer of a proleptic lectureship at Bristol in 2018. In 2019 he was promoted to Associate Professor.
We have been successful in our bid for a seed-corn grant from the Bristol Centre for Agricultural Innovation to investigate the fluorescence lifetimes of iridescent chloroplasts using fluorescence lifetime imaging. This will help upgrade our current time-correlated single photon counting apparatus and enable confocal imaging of single chloroplasts. These studies will investigate if the non-photochemical quenching response of the iridoplasts is related to their photonic structure.
Giordano Amoruso, Mary Jenkinson-Finch (Steve Mann’s group) and Roman Abrams (Jonathan Clayden’s group) were the University of Bristol’s representatives at the 6th Jilin University Chemistry Graduate Forum. Giordano presented his recent work investigating Förster resonant energy transfer in quantum dot-bacterial reaction centre conjugates.
Dr Daniel Polak joins the Oliver group following PhD studies with Dr Jenny Clark at the University of Sheffield. In his PhD, Daniel studied singlet fission of polyenes inside de novo maquette proteins and the effect of microcavities on the emission efficiency of singlet fission. Daniel will use multidimensional optical spectroscopies to explore chemical and biomolecular condensed phase dynamics.
The Oliver Research Group 