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 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 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”