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!
A paper by Tom, another former FRG member and joint PhD student with long-standing collaborator Dr Wuge Briscoe, on the influence of solvent polarity on the structure of TANI-surfactant thin films has been accepted for publication by Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics!
Tom, who just finished a post-doc at the ESRF in Grenoble, investigated the influence of processing solvents on supramolecular structure formation using grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXS). Well done to all those who contributed, including Alex and Ben from the FRG!
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!
Geri, a former PhD student in the FRG, and now doing a post-doc at MANA, part of the National Institute of Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, published the last paper from her PhD work in Langmuir. This output was a collaborative effort with Ian Hamley from Reading, and her second supervisor Guy Lloyd-Jones, now at Edinburgh.
Ionic self-assembled complexes of chiral perylene tectons were prepared and characterised in detail. See the just-accepted paper here! Well done Geri!
We have had a number of visitors to the group. Firstly we have May, who won a Nuffield Foundation Research Placement Scholarship, and will be spending 4 weeks in the group, exploring novel dye-surfactant supramolecular complexes.
Rui Yao, a 6-month visitor from Nanjing, where he is doing his PhD, arrived last week.
And finally, we have Jack Underhill, who has visited the group twice before, working alongside May on dye-surfactant supramolecular complexes.
Welcome!
Great weather, hot air balloons, and various festivals (including the Harbour Festival, and the Urbain Paint Festival) is probably the best description of Bristol at the moment!
Here a photo taken from Charl’s office, showing a hot air balloon in front of the cathedral! What a great place to live!
Maha and Charl are attending the well-known International Conference on Synthetic Metals, the longest-running conference series in the field of conducting and semiconducting organic materials. This year the conference is held in Guangzhou, China, which is very humid and hot this time of the year!
Maha is presenting a poster, and Charl gave a talk on Monday (and chaired the afternoon session). More updates to follow soon!
Charl is visiting the chemistry departments at the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch this week to explore potential collaborations and give research seminars. It is of course great to be back in South Africa, and great to visit old friends, colleagues and potential new collaborators.
Charl is being hosted by Assoc. Prof. Greg Smith at UCT, and Dr Prinessa Chellan at Stellenbosch.
Esther successfully defended her MSc thesis earlier this week. She did a great job, and both the examiners (Dr George Whittell, as internal, and Dr Louis Adriaenssens from the University of Lincoln) were very impressed with her performance! With the viva behind her, Esther is ready to join the BCFN as PhD student in September.
Of course we celebrated afterwards! Well done Esther!
Charl gave an invited lecture at the 21st International Symposium on Surfactants in Solution 2016 (or SIS2016 for short!), held in Jinan, Shandong province, in China (see photo below). Prof. Jingcheng Hao, Head of the Key Laboratory of Colloid and Interface Chemistry, Shandong University, was the local host.
The conference had many exciting presentations, including a plenary lecture from the legendary Prof. Toyoko Imae (now in Taiwan), who was one of the first (if not the first) scientist to have imaged worm-like micelles!
