Faraday joint interest group conference 2023

Roberta Croce studied chemistry in Padova and completed her Ph.D. in Plant Biology/Biophysics in Milano in 1998. After two postdoc periods in Germany and Italy, she got a permanent position at the CNR. In 2006 she moved to the University of Groningen and since 2011 she is Professor of Biophysics/Photosynthesis and head of the group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of photosynthesis, using an integrated approach including molecular biology, biochemistry and ultrafast spectroscopy. She has published more than 170 scientific articles. She is a member of the Royal Holland Society of Science and Humanity and recipient of several personal research grants. 
 

Laura Gagliardi received her undergraduate degree and PhD degree in theoretical chemistry from the University of Bologna in 1997, and then spent two years at Cambridge University, in England, as a postdoctoral scholar. She began her independent academic career as an assistant professor at the University of Palermo, Italy, moving in 2005 to take an appointment as associate professor at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. In 2009, she moved to the United States where she was a professor at the University of Minnesota. She remained there until her move to the University of Chicago in 2020.
 
Professor Gagliardi is the Richard and Kathy Leventhal Professor at the University of Chicago with a joint appointment at the Department of Chemistry and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. She also serves as the Director for the Chicago Center for Theoretical Chemistry.
 
She has received much recognition, including the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 2020; the Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the Physical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society in 2019, the Humboldt research award in 2018; and the Bourke Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2016. Laura  is an Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (2019) and Academia Europaea (2018). She also serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In addition to her dedication to science, Laura is a strong advocate for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
 
Laura is a computational quantum chemist who is known for her contributions to the development of electronic structure methods and their use for understanding complex chemical systems. Her long-term goal is to advance these methods so that they can be employed to study energy-relevant chemical systems and materials. She is interested in discovering novel porous materials that can be employed for gas phase separations, CO2 capture, and environmental remediation.
 
She is an expert in homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis with special focus on reactions involving C–H bond activation, which are relevant to the liquefaction of natural gas. She has also significantly advanced the field of heavy-element chemistry, where her research has ranged from the fundamental level (e.g. the discovery of a new type of chemical bond in the U2 molecule), to more applied efforts such as chemical separations of spent nuclear fuels. Laura also studies magnetic materials that can be used in quantum information systems.

Stephen Leone is the John R. Thomas Endowed Chair in Physical Chemistry, Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty investigator, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received his BA at Northwestern University in Chemistry and his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the University of Southern California and later established a lengthy career in Boulder, Colorado, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, in the Institute JILA and the Departments of Chemistry and Physics. His honors include the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry, the Herbert P. Broida Prize of the American Physical Society, the Bourke Medal of the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Peter Debye Award, the Polanyi Medal of the Gas Kinetics Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics of the American Physical Society, the Ahmed Zewail Award of the American Chemical Society, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Warwick. He is a member of National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 
His research interests are ultrafast and attosecond laser investigations of atomic, molecular, and solid-state dynamics in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray. His group developed femtosecond extreme ultraviolet transient absorption and extended the methodology to attosecond transient absorption and reflectivity, attosecond transient diffraction, and attosecond four-wave mixing. His laboratories explore electronic and vibrational superpositions, curve crossing dynamics and conical intersections, ring opening processes, photofragmentation, and singlet-to-triplet transitions, semiconductor band gap physics, polaron formation, charge transfer processes in solids, charge transport across junctions, and phase changes in materials.

Jonathan Reid is Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Bristol. His research interests are focused on the microphysics of aerosols, using novel techniques to study the physical, chemical and biological transformation of individual aerosol particles. He is director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Aerosol Science, the Editor-in-Chief of Aerosol Science and Technology, and the 2021 recipient of the Tilden Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Jana Roithová graduated from Charles University in the Czech Republic (1998). Her Ph.D. thesis focused on reaction dynamics (2003), and she learned mass spectrometry techniques with Prof. Schwarz (Berlin). From 2007 to 2018, she was a lecturer and then a professor at Charles University. Since 2018, she has held a chair in spectroscopy and catalysis at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She develops techniques to study reaction mechanisms, focusing on reactive intermediates in metal-catalyzed reactions. Her research interests span from reaction mechanisms of organometallic reactions and mechanisms of small molecule activation to new reactivity concepts and reaction design. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received several prizes, e.g. the Ignaz L Lieben Award from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Rudolf Lukeš prize from the Czech Chemical Society.

Nancy Artioli is currently an assistant professor at the university of Brescia and Visiting Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast. From 2015 to 2021, she was a full-time lecturer in chemical engineering at Queen’s University Belfast.  She graduated in Chemical Engineering (MSc) at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2008 and in 2012 she received the PhD title from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano. From 2010 to 2011, she was Visiting Scholar at the Laboratory for the Science and Application of Catalysis (LSAC), University of California at Berkeley (USA). In 2012 She worked as Post-doctoral fellow from at the Laboratory of Catalysis and Catalytic Processes (LCCP) at the Politecnico di Milano and then, from 2013 to 2015, at the Laboratory of Catalysis and Spectrochemistry (LCS) in Caen (France). She became Lecturer in Chemical Engineering in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast in 2015.
Her research group, the CEEP - Catalysis for Energy and Environmental Protection- works on the development of innovative catalytic processes with the aim of implementing green and sustainable production technologies that helps provide a paradigm shift from fossil-based manufacturing to renewable materials. This includes research areas on CO2 capture and valorisation for the production of platform chemicals and bio-fuels and the design of catalytic systems for environmental protection to reduce emissions in the industry and transport sector.

Volker Deringer is Associate Professor of Theoretical and Computational Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He obtained his doctorate from RWTH Aachen University under guidance of Richard Dronskowski (2014) and then moved to the University of Cambridge, initially as a fellow of the Humboldt Foundation (2015-2017), then as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. In 2019, he joined the faculty at Oxford. He was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize in 2022. His research group explores the connections between structure, bonding, and properties in inorganic functional materials (http://deringer.chem.ox.ac.uk).

Emily is currently a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. Dr Draper's interests are the characterisation and control of supramolecular structures. She enjoys using small angle neutron scattering, rheology and electrochemistry, trying to combine them all to monitor changes in situ, with the aim to understand and control what processes can occur in these organic supramolecular systems. Dr Emily Draper received her PhD from the University of Liverpool’s School of Chemistry and received the 'Best Thesis' award in 2016 from the RSC Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry group. She carried out two PDRA positions, one in Liverpool and then at the University of Glasgow working on multi-component gels. In September 2017 Emily was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship and a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Leadership Award from the University of Glasgow. Emily then set up her own research group working on flexible electronic materials made from supramolecular self-assembled materials. This has now expanded into chromic devices, ophthalmic devices, and materials for specialised cell culture and differentiation. In 2018, Emily became a Lecturer in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and in 2020 received the BTM Willis prize in neutron scattering from the U.K. neutron scattering users group for her work on characterisation on supramolecular materials using neutrons. Emily was awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship from the UKRI in 2021.

Rachel Evans is a Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge. She received her MChem and PhD from Swansea University, before undertaking postdoctoral positions at the Université Paris-Sud, France and the Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal. Before moving to Cambridge, she was Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin, where she co-founded Senoptica Technologies to commercialise a sensor platform developed in her lab. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute for Materials, Minerals and Mining and is the recipient of the 2022 McBain Medal from the RSC/SCI.
Rachel leads the Photoactive Materials group whose research focuses the design of soft and hybrid materials for energy, sustainability and sensing technologies, encompassing materials chemistry, advanced characterisation and device implementation. She currently holds a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant to design spectral converters to enhance the deployability of solar cells.

Brianna Heazlewood is an EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Early Career Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Liverpool. Brianna completed her undergraduate and PhD degrees at the University of Sydney, moving to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in 2012. Brianna set up an independent Cold Chemical Physics research group at Oxford in 2016, studying gas-phase reactions under cold and controlled conditions. The Cold Chemical Physics group relocated to the University of Liverpool in 2021. They use techniques including laser cooling and the application of external electric and magnetic fields to control the properties of ionic and neutral reactants—with sensitive detection methods enabling the resulting ion–molecule reaction dynamics and kinetics to be examined. In addition to being of fundamental interest, many of these reaction systems are directly relevant to the chemistry occurring in the atmosphere and in the interstellar medium. Brianna was the recipient of the 2021 RSC Marlow Award and the 2020 IOP Henry Moseley Medal and Prize.

Neil gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2000. He became an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in 2006 and was awarded a European Research Council Starting Investigator grant for 2D-IR spectroscopy development in 2008. Neil was appointed to a Professorship in Ultrafast Chemical Physics at Strathclyde in 2016 and moved to the University of York to take up the post of Professor of Physical Chemistry in 2018. His research interests focus on applications of 2D-IR spectroscopy to determine the role of fast structural dynamics in biomolecular processes.

Dr Anabel Lanterna is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham, UK. She obtained her PhD degree in Chemistry from the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. Her studies focussed on the synthesis and manipulation of gold nanoparticles and included stints at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and the University of Valencia (Spain), where she became interested in Photochemistry. Following her PhD, Anabel moved to the University of Ottawa, Canada, as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof Scaiano, where she developed her expertise in heterogeneous photocatalysis. In 2020, Anabel was appointed as Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, where she began her independent career focussing on the rational design of heterogeneous photocatalysts based on earth-abundant, inexpensive, and stable materials for applications in Sustainable Chemistry and green hydrogen generation. Her scientific contributions are documented in 49 scientific articles, 2 book chapters and 1 patent. She is the recipient of the RSC ECR Environment, Sustainability and Energy Division Prize (2022), the Chemical Institute of Canada recognition to Outstanding Young Materials Chemists (2018), and the Inter-American Photochemical Society Gerhard Closs Post-Doctoral Award (2017) for her contributions to Sustainability, Materials Sciences and Photochemistry.

Dr Andrew Parnell undertook a Physics PhD with the title “A Study of Weak Polyelectrolyte Brushes” supervised by Professor Richard Jones FRS. He was then a postdoctoral researcher (2006-2007) in the Sheffield Department of Chemistry working with Professor Patrick Fairclough. During this period he started to develop his long term interest in structural colour. He returned to the Sheffield Physics department in 2007 to work on the EPSRC funded Soft nanotechnology platform grant held by Professor Jones FRS. In 2011 he won the (IChemE) Innovative product of the year, this award was for the development of materials that exhibit photonic properties that can be tuned to a specific wavelength. In 2015 he was promoted to the lecturer grade and is currently a permanent research fellow in the Physics department. Dr Parnell was chosen as the Institute of Physics Polymer Physics Group /DPOLY Polymer exchange lecturer for 2017 and gave an invited talk at the March American Physical Society (APS) meeting in New Orleans. The talk was titled “Self-assembled structural colour in nature”
 
His research group currently has ongoing research interests in thin film polymer physics, cross-linked polymer networks, self-assembled solar cells, antimicrobial surfaces and structural colour - synthetic and its formation in nature. He also has a long running interest in the use of neutron and X-ray scattering (SAXS, SANS, SESANS and neutron reflectivity) to study soft matter and biological systems, with a particular focus on in-situ experiments. 

Sally, officially Sarah, Price trained as a theoretical chemist at the University of Cambridge, specialising in deriving models of the forces between molecules from their wavefunctions.  She worked at the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge, before becoming a lecturer at UCL (University College London), where she is now a Professor specialising in Computational Chemistry.
In developing the theory and computer codes to model the organic solid state, she has collaborated widely with experimental solid state chemists, pharmaceutical scientists, theoretical physicists and computational scientists, including leading the Basic Technology Project “Control and Prediction of the Organic Solid State”. She was awarded he RSC Interdisciplinary Prize in 2015 and elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2017 in recognition of the value of this collaborative work that has, and continues to, reveal the complexities of organic crystallisation.
Sally has written over 200 scientific publications, mainly in Chemistry journals but also in leading Pharmaceutical Science, Crystallography Molecular Biology and Physics journals. Those arising from the CPOSS work which form the basis of this lecture are on the website www.cposs.org.uk  . Many of these are multi-disciplinary arising from stimulating work with a large number of PhD students, PDRAs, and academic and industrial scientists from many disciplines.

Ian Sims is Professor of Physics at the University of Rennes 1 in France, in the Molecular Physics Department of the Institute of Physics Rennes. His research is focused on elementary reactions and energy transfer in the gas phase, especially at very low temperatures, with particular relevance to astrochemistry. Prior to moving to Rennes in 2003 he was on the staff of the School of Chemistry of the University of Birmingham (first as an EPSRC Advanced Fellow, then Lecturer and Senior Lecturer). He studied Natural Sciences at St John’s College, Cambridge, before moving with Professor Ian WM Smith to Birmingham for his PhD. He then did postdoctoral research at Caltech (with Ahmed Zewail) and Rennes (with Bertrand Rowe). Along with Ian Smith and Bertrand Rowe and colleagues he was responsible for the discovery of fast radical-molecule reactions at the low temperatures of interstellar clouds for which the Rennes and Birmingham teams were awarded one of the first EU Descartes Prizes in 2000, and he continues to be active in this area.

Vas Stavros is a Professor in Physical Chemistry and a Royal Society Industry Fellow at the University of Warwick. He has been working on ultrafast non-radiative decay processes in polyatomic systems – the underlying photophysical process that drives molecular light-to-heat conversion – since the start of his independent academic career in 2005. These polyatomic systems have been broad-ranging; from biological building blocks (e.g., nucleic bases) to nature-based UV filters (e.g., the plant UV filter sinapoyl malate) and artificial UV filters (avobenzone and oxybenzone as exemplars) found in commercial sunscreen formulations. After completing 8 years of his Royal Society University Research Fellowship, he was promoted to reader in 2013 and then to Professor in 2017. Prior to this, he undertook PhD studies at Kings College London with Professor Helen Fielding and Postdoctoral studies at both Kings College London and UC Berkeley with Professor Steve Leone.

Dr Daniel Stone is an experimental physical chemist with a focus on atmospheric oxidation processes. He obtained his PhD in laboratory studies of peroxy radical reaction kinetics relevant to the atmosphere from University College London, for which he was awarded the Ramsay Medal in 2006. Following his PhD, he moved to The University of Manchester as a post-doctoral researcher in electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, and then to the University of Leeds as a post-doctoral researcher, where he performed research in atmospheric modelling using the Master Chemical Mechanism, field observations of reactive species from ground-based and aircraft platforms, and laboratory studies of atmospheric and combustion systems. He was awarded a NERC Independent Research Fellowship in 2014 to investigate the chemistry of reactive species in the Earth’s atmosphere using time-resolved absorption techniques at the University of Leeds, where he is now an associate professor. His research uses a combination of laboratory experiments, field observations, and numerical modelling to understand the chemistry of reactive species involved in oxidation processes, and the impacts of reactive species on atmospheric composition, air quality, and climate.