Carl had passed his viva today, and we can now finally call him Dr Hu! Well done Carl! His external examiner was Prof. Bo Laursen, from the University of Copenhagen, and internal was Dr George Whittell.
Celebrations already started, and will continue later in the day! Congratulations!
Time flies, and we had our annual Christmas lunch at Charl & Jacqueline’s home! Great food, great company, fantastic “Secret Santa” presents, and some great games!
We also had a Christmas Quiz – with two tasty prizes! What a way to prepare for Christmas!
The University of Bristol has just finalised a new agreement with the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for 20 PhD students per year for the next 5 years. This is great news, and Bristol will benefit greatly from this new initiative!
Charl is currently in Beijing talking to prospective CSC PhD candidates at the International Graduate Scholarship Fair of the CSC.
Charl had his birthday recently, and we celebrated with friends, former group members and colleagues, and consumed lots of cake!
Here Charl and the group with some evidence of cake still left!
Charl also visited Prof Bo Song at the University of Soochow, Suzhou, China. Bo, a former PhD student of close collaborator prof Xi Zhang at Tsinghua University, was the perfect host, and made sure that the stay was perfect!
Charl gave two lectures – one covering research aspects from the Faul Research Group, and one where he shared some experiences about laboratory safety from the School of Chemistry here in Bristol!
Yaozu put together a one-day symposium on advanced functional materials and supramolecular chemistry at Donghua University, Shanghai, where he now holds a professorship.
He invited a number of speakers (including Arne Thomas from Berlin, and Charl!), as well as a number of local colleagues who also spent time in Bristol as post docs.
It was a great day of exciting science, spanning fundamental science all the way through to real-word applications. Well done Yaozu!
Exciting news – Carl’s paper on switchable photonic structures from 3D printed oligo(aniline)-based materials has been accepted for publication in Advanced Optical Materials.
This project, with collaborators from the School of Physics (Henkjan and Ben) and Electronic Engineering (Daniel, Lifeng, Mike and John), explored the use of 3D printing and actively switchable redox-active oligo(aniline)-based materials to create novel tuneable 3D photonic materials. Well done to Carl, and all our collaborators!
Charl is currently in China for a short conference tour. He is starting in Beijing, where he is speaking at the Porous Organic Polymers meeting (held in the impressive Chinese Academy of Science’s Academic Hall).
Charl will then also visit former FRG group member Yaozu Liao at Donghua University in Shanghai, to take part in an exciting one-day symposium (organised by Yaozu). Finally, Charl will use the opportunity to visit and give an invited lecture at Suzhou University.
It was high time for the Faul Research Group (and friends) to have a social get together again! We made use of the fantastic (late) summer weather, and had a wonderful BBQ in the gardens of BISC.
Great weather, great food and great company!
It was time again for the annual Bristol Balloon Fiesta, Europe’s largest balloon festival! It was a spectacular weekend of beautiful balloons and a festive atmosphere in Bristol! Several of the FRG group members joined in the fun – here some photos from them!
Please also see “The Guardian” newspaper’s photos here!
Faul Research Group 