Congratulations to Fabiola Cardoso Delgado who passed her PhD viva voce exam. In her PhD studies, Fabiola used reflectance microscopy and time-correlated single photon counting to investigate the response of iridescent chloroplasts in Phyllagathis rotundifolia to different light conditions. Fabiola is now a post-doc at the University of Southern California with Steve Bradforth.
Teo’s paper which demonstrates very small changes in reaction conditions can tune carbon dot fluorescence from the blue to the green has been accepted for publication in Nanoscale, and can be accessed here. Well done Teo!
As part of a consortium led by Ross Anderson (Bristol Biochemistry), Tom Oliver has secured a BBSRC sLoLa grant BB/W003449/1 worth £4.9 m entitled “Creating and comprehending the circuitry of life: precise biomolecular design of multi-centre redox enzymes for a synthetic metabolism”.
The project seeks to investigate the flow of energy and electrons through individual and arrays of photoactive de novo proteins. The project encompasses protein design, modelling, synthesis and spectroscopic characterisation between groups from Bristol (Anderson, Curnow, Oliver and Mulholland), Portsmouth (Lichtenstein), UCL (Marechal) and UEA (Butt)
Within the Oliver group, ultrafast laser spectroscopies such as transient absorption, time-resolved infrared and 2D electronic spectroscopies will be used to unravel the excited state processes and the flow of energy within these designer proteins spanning femtoseconds-to-milliseconds timescales.
Bristol-led 6-year EPSRC programme grant Ultrafast Photochemical Dynamics in Complex Environments started last month. The grant led by Andrew Orr-Ewing seeks to understand how the photochemistry of molecules is changed by their environment using a variety of techniques that include: Coulomb explosion imaging, transient X-ray absorption spectroscopy, multidimensional optical spectroscopies, time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy and ab initio multi-spawning theoretical calculations. The expansive collaborative project brings together groups from UCL (Helen Fielding and Graham Worth), Imperial (Jon Marangos), Oxford (Claire Vallance and Mark Brouard), Durham (Basile Curchod) and Bristol (Andrew Orr-Ewing and Tom Oliver).
Well done to Giordano Amoruso for passing his viva voce examination. His PhD thesis was entitled “Ultrafast photoinduced bimolecular proton, electron and energy transfer”.
Well done to Olivia Hawkins for passing her MSc(R) viva voce exam. Her MSc(R) thesis was entitled “Investigating the Excited State Dynamics of 1,6-Diphenyl-1,3,5- Hexatriene Using Time Correlated Single Photon Counting”.
Congratulations to Olivia and Giordano for submitting their MSc(R) and PhD theses in the last month!
Congratulations to Giordano for the publication of his paper, “High-efficiency excitation energy transfer in biohybrid quantum dot–bacterial reaction center nanoconjugates” which has just been published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. In this collaborative work with Dr Mike Jones in Biochemistry, Giordano engineered a novel fluorescent bacterial reaction centre mutant which was conjugated to CdTe quantum dots. These two moieties formed a highly efficiency FRET pair allowing for broadband solar light harvesting across all visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The article is available to read here.
Giordano’s bimolecular proton transfer paper published in 2019 has been included in a special virtual issue of J Phys Chem B on proton transfer edited by Prof Sharon Hammes-Schiffer.
Congratulations to Hilary McCarthy who won the Graduate Chemistry Association prize for best 1 minute to save the planet presentation, entitled “Enhancing photosynthesis: light, nanoparticles, action?!”
The Oliver Research Group 