Group Members

Postdoctoral Research Fellows
Dr. Ziyi (Eric) Hu, 2022-
	Eric received his Master’s degree from Northeast Petroleum University (China) in materials chemistry, before his PhD at the University of Warwick in Physics. His PhD project concentrated on using ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy and analytical electron microscopy to investigate the properties of 1D carbon nanotube heterostructures. Eric’s expertise also includes electrochemical spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy and scanning probe microscopy. He is now a postdoc in the Oliver group working on ultrafast spectroscopy of de novo proteins as part of the BBSRC Circuits of Life sLoLa grant.
PhD Students
Teo Garcia Millan, 2018-
	Teo joined the Oliver group in 2018 and is jointly supervised by Prof. Carmen Galan and Tom Oliver in close collaboration with DST Innovations Ltd and funded by CONACYT. Teo is synthesising an array of fluorescent carbon nanodots for potential applications in digital display technologies. He received his bachelor’s degree in Nanotechnology and Molecular Engineering from Universidad de las Americas Puebla in Mexico in 2016 where he worked in the degradation of organic compounds using electrocatalysis. Also in 2016, Teo participated in different research groups in CIDETEQ on electrochemistry subjects until he joined the BCFN in 2017. Once at Bristol he has worked on soft-matter and single particle experiments before joining Tom’s group.
Hilary McCarthy, 2019-
	Hilary is jointly supervised by Drs. Heather Whitney and Tom Oliver, as an EPSRC Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials (BCFN) PhD student. Hilary’s research focusses on how dynamic photonic crystals found in iridescent brown algae (Cystoseira Tamariscafolia) might enhance photosynthetic light capture. She also plans to investigate the impact of carbon dot uptake on algal photosynthesis in collaboration with Prof. Carmen Galan. Hilary was awarded her MSci in Chemistry from the University of Bristol in 2018. During her integrated Masters and the first year of her BCFN CDT, she has worked in numerous groups across different parts of the University before joining the Oliver and Whitney groups in 2019.
Camilla Gajo, 2020-
	Camilla joined the Oliver group after completing a year in the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials as an MSc student, subsequent to graduating from Keele University in 2019 (BSc Physics with Mathematics). Camilla’s research will initially focus on the chromophore-environment interactions in bilin pigments using multidimensional ultrafast spectroscopy.
Olivia Hawkins, 2021-
	Olivia joined the Oliver group as an MSc by research student investigating the dynamics of diphenylhexatriene in solution. She started her PhD in Autumn 2021 as part of EPSRC programme grant Ultrafast Photochemical Dynamics in Complex Environments. Olivia, graduated from UCL in 2020 (BSc, Chemistry) and performed additional research with Neil Allan studying radiation damage of Li₂O.
Rokas Petrenas, 2021-
	Rokas graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 with a degree in Biochemistry. During his final year, he worked with Dr Chris Wood on the application of deep learning for protein design. In 2021, he joined the SWBio DTP PhD programme and is working on biosensing using α-helical barrels. His project is co-supervised by Dek Woolfson and Tom Oliver.
Undergraduate Project Student
Alex Hannon, 2022
	Alex is currently a Chemistry MSci undergraduate student at Bristol, and will start his 4th year in the Autumn. Last summer he worked with Adrian Mulholland’s group in the CCC. He undertook a summer project in the Oliver group in 2022 working on the excited state dynamics of polyenes.