Both Tom and Charl were out and about today, giving talks. Tom spoke at the Xmas beamline user meeting in Liverpool on his TANI-surfactant structure investigations, while Charl gave a research seminar at the School of Chemistry in Leeds.
After a number of lectures introducing liquid crystals and soft matter to the undergraduate students from the Department of Chemistry at Tsinghua University, Charl’s time in China is slowly coming to an end.
Here a photo of Charl with some of the students who joined the course! Thanks to everyone who contributed to make this a very enjoyable experience!
Charl has been in China for the past two weeks, lecturing at the Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, in their Tsinghua Xuetang programme for undergraduate students (“Introduction to Liquid Crystals and Soft Matter”), as well as joining in discussion with Prof Xi Zhang and his group on various collaborative projects.
He has just arrived in snowy Changchun today, where he will give a research seminar at the College of Chemistry, Jilin University, invited by Prof Junqi Sun.
Saravanan attended the International conference on nanoscience and nanotechnology (ICONN2013), held in Chennai, India (18-20 March 2013). This excellent conference was organized by SRM university. Saravanan presented the latest results from his research (”Liquid-crystalline tetra(aniline)s for photovoltaic applications”). This was an excellent opportunity to meet the national and international scientists and students from various parts of the world (India, Japan, New Zealand, Mexico, Switzerland, Ireland, USA, Germany, etc).
It was a very good trip!!!!
[Photo: From left to right Dr. Ajay Tiwari (Shizuoka University, Japan), Dr. Saravanan and Dr. V. Madhu Mohan (Shizuoka University, Japan)].
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Angel’s fruitful visit to Prof. Kaner’s lab in UCLA has come to an end. Angel concluded the two month visit with a talk about how the visit has helped him with his project. In particular, he spoke about the synthesis … Continue reading
Ben’s review of HSAFM (with Loren Picco and Merv Miles, Ben’s second supervisor, from the Nanophysics and Soft Matter group in the School of Physics) has been accepted for publication in Small. More to follow soon! Congratulations!
Ben has just returned from visiting Prof. Gregory Salamo and Dr. Michael Hawkridge at the Arkansas Nano-Bio Materials Characterization Facility, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA.
He made use of their X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) equipment, which provided information about the atomic composition of his films with approx 10 µm resolution (X-Y) and sub-10nm resolution (Z). The XPS experiments allowed him to characterise any chemical changes that may take place in his film to result in the changes in conductivity observed.
Ben travelled to the US with Dr. Loren Picco, a colleague in the Nanophysics group in Bristol, and the trip was funded by an EPSRC “Building Global Engagements” grant. Loren specialises in high-speed AFM (HSAFM) and was visiting Arkansas to help them set up a high-speed AFM to be based in the Nano-Bio Materials Characterization Facility
The final paper from Rumman’s efforts (during his PhD and one-year postdoc here in Bristol) appeared in the latest edition of JACS! This output forms part of a very fruitful collaboration between the Faul and Manners research groups.
The use of ionic self-assembly to access non-conventional block copolymer morphologies, including tetragonal and helical structures, from a combination of polyferrocenylsilane diblock copolymer polyelectrolytes and AOT-based surfactants, is described in the communication. Congratulations to all involved!
February seems to be the month of international travel! Angel has just gone to UCLA (see his post below), Saravanan is spending a week in Grenoble with our collaborator Dr Patrice Rannou, and Ben Brown is heading off to Arkansas next week for some XPS studies. Enjoy!
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Angel is visiting the Kaner lab at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. This visit represents a good opportunity to exchange ideas and learn different techniques to characterise organic semiconductors. Angel’s project involves the use of bio-inspired motifs to achieve control … Continue reading
Faul Research Group 