Welcome to Somnath Kashid who joins us as a postdoctoral research fellow on the BBSRC sLoLa Circuits of Life grant. Somnath obtained his PhD from CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, under the supervision of Dr Sayan Bagchi where he used ultrafast two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations to study hydrogen bond dynamics. He then conducted postdoctoral research with Prof Arindam Chowdhury at IIT, Bombay using single molecule florescence spectroscopy and FLIM to study Molybdenum disulfide plates.

Welcome to new PhD students Meiyue Liu and Jacob Jones who have joined the research group! We celebrated them joining the group and the end of Tom’s 8-year Royal Society University Research Fellowship in style with a group meal at Picaro.

Teo’s paper detailing the engineering of dual fluorescent carbon dots and their applications for human brain tissue imaging has just been accepted for publication in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, and can be downloaded here.

Well done to Daniel, Alex, Gui and Olivia’s for having their paper exploring the complex photophysics of diphenyloctatetraene in 10 different solvents accepted for publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. The manuscript represents Tom’s contribution to the Emerging Researchers in Physical Chemistry Volume 2 special issue of JPC. The article can be read here.

Hilary McCarthy has won a poster prize at the 2023 GRC conference on Photosynthesis for her work on carbon dots and algae. Very well done Hilary!

Caleb Jordan has joined the Oliver group as a postdoctoral research associate working on the EPSRC programme grant Ultrafast Photochemical Dynamics in Complex Environments. He will use novel multidimensional optical spectroscopies to how probe chromophore-environment interactions alter photophysical dynamics in an array of different systems. Caleb was previously a PhD student in the group of Prof Jan Verlet at Durham.

A synchronised dual-Pharos laser system with two OPAs was recently installed in the Oliver labs at the University of Bristol by Light Conversion as part of BBSRC sLoLa grant The Circuits of Life (BB/W003449/1). The dual-amplified laser system is capable of seamlessly interrogating dynamics between 100 fs to 1 ms and will be used to track the long-range energy and electron transfer in novel photoactive proteins.

Daniel’s paper detailing the excited state dynamics of three TDPP molecules in solution has been accepted in Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys.. The paper includes wavepacket signatures that remarkably originate from nuclear motions created at conical intersections on the excited state potential energy surface.