PhD student, Junru Chen, who started in October last year, gave his first presentation at an emPOWER project meeting on Monday, updating all on his progress related to bio-adhesives for artificial muscle applications!

Congratulations to Dr Yubing Wang (former group member) who passed her viva on February 27th at Xi’an Jiaotong University! Her research focused on the design and applications of conjugated microporous polymers in the removal of heavy metal pollution in wastewater.

Well done, Dr Yubing!

As the academic year wraps up, our final-year research project students have recently presented their hard work from the past few months. Well done to all, and congratulations from the entire group!

To celebrate their success, the group enjoyed a well-deserved gathering at Pizza-on-the-Park!

It was very recently announced that Charl will be taking on a senior role within the University of Bristol – as Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement), Faculty of Science and Engineering.

Charl will be responsible for the wider global engagement for the faculty, making use of his extensive international contacts and experience to lead on a range of new initiatives. Charl will however still be (very!) research active, with 50% of his time still dedicated to his research group and related activities!

Charl spent last week in India and attended 3 conferences! The first was the very interesting QS India Summit 2025, exploring equitable partnerships, rankings and related matters. He then joined the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) 3rd Energy Transition Summit in New Delhi as panellist, and finally joined the PIE Live India Summit as panellist, hosted by the UK-India Business Council (UKIBC) – speaking on academia-industry interactions.

Thank you to colleagues from QS, FICCI, UKIBC, and The Pie for the kind hosting and invitations to contribute!

Finally, an opportunity for the group to enjoy some sunshine and ice cream under beautiful blue skies in Bristol! Ben and Sam not in the photo, unfortunately!

Welcome back also to Safa, after a period back home in Oman!

The Timms Lecture and Symposium 2024, hosted at the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry was a resounding success, featuring distinguished speakers and ground-breaking research.

• Professor Anna Slater from the University of Liverpool delivered a talk on flow chemistry, highlighting its implications for supramolecular chemistry.
• Dr Mike Price from the University of Bristol spoke about ultrafast Coulomb interactions in organic semiconductors, focusing on advancements in photovoltaics and how device physics and ultrafast spectroscopy guide progress in solar energy applications, including solar cells, LEDs, and lasers.
• Dr Ananya Mishra from the University of Bristol presented research on biocatalytic programmable protocells, integrating molecular cues into Boolean responses to mimic cellular logic networks for synthetic biology applications.
• Professor Richard Kaner from UCLA delivered an enlightening lecture on the synthesis and diverse applications of graphene, emphasising its potential in various fields.

The event included a poster session where researchers at different levels showcased their latest findings. The day concluded with a drinks reception, providing an excellent opportunity for networking and celebrating scientific achievements. Poster prizes were awarded with our very own Xue Fang achieving a prize for best poster.

Pleased to share our cover feature in ACS Applied Polymer Materials, June 14, 2024, Volume 6.

In this work, we describe a novel cationic porous organic polymer (POP) made of interconnected, protonated polyaryl amines. This POP material rapidly removes carcinogenic Cr₂O₇^2- with high capacity, excellent selectivity, and reusability, even at very low concentrations.

Link to article.

Exciting presentations by three brilliant Faul Group researchers at the UKPorMat 2024 conference in Liverpool!

Shaohua Li: Optimised porous polyimides (pPIs) for metal-free electrocatalytic CO₂ reduction
Ulzhalgas Karatayeva: Conjugated Microporous Polymers as Novel Electrorheological Fluids
Xue Fang: Inverse solvent design frameworks for the preparation of porous organic polymers

Ulzhalgas (left) and Shaohua (right) pictured below.

Charl is currently in India, and gave a plenary lecture at the exciting conference organised by Prof Pravin Ingole, Department of Chemistry, IIT Delhi!

Great to be sharing results from the group on CMPs for CO₂ conversion, water purification and related topics!