Student Success

We are delighted to congratulate five current students that have all been recently awarded prizes for the excellent quality of their work. All have made strong and effective use of the assorted materials characterisation facilities as the nmRC. The five successful students are:

1: Julie Watts who is an Engineering PhD student and won first place for her third year presentation on the Advanced Materials Research Day held on the 26th of June. Julie's PhD aims to gain knowledge of the process-structure relationship and processibility of porous nanocarbon structures and evaluate functional properties of this novel material. As part of her studies Julie has used Tranmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) extensively as a means to visualise these tiny structures.

2: Dr Scott Miners who won the Turner Prize for the best PhD thesis submitted in the Inorganic and Materials Section, in the School of Chemistry 2016. Scott’s research focussed on the application of single-walled carbon nanotubes as containers for preparative chemical reactions and utilised TEM/EDX and Raman spectroscopy at the nmRC to explore the properties of molecules inside carbon nanotubes. Scott can be seen below receiving his award from Prof. Jim Turner.

3: Max Astle who was one of the three winners of the Hubberstey Prize (best poster presentation) at the Inorganic and Materials Symposium, 2017:  Max’s interests concern the application of Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) and elemental mapping (EDX) for the structural characterisation of hybrid materials comprising metal oxides and carbon nanotubes as catalytic nanoreactors. Notably Max and Scott are both members of the Nottingham Nanocarbon Group. Established in 2004 and currently led by nmRC director Prof. Andrei Khlobystov, the awards represent a great success around the outstanding work into the investigation of the chemistry of carbon nanomaterials and it's application to develop advanced technologies for their catalytic, synthetic and analytical applications. Max can be seen below receiving his award from Prof. Neil Champness.

4: Alanna Murphey who was also a recipient of the Hubberstey Prize (best poster presentation) at the Inorganic and Materials Symposium, 2017. Supervised by Prof. David Amabilino Alanna's project involves making new materials for organic solar cells. The electron microscopy facilities at the nmRC have contributed to this in two ways. Firstly SEM allows the visualisation of the microscopic features of the devices, such as layer thickness and bulk morphology. Secondly TEM measurements look a promising means to describe the distribution of materials in the mixtures of donors and acceptors that we use at the nanometre scale. Alanna can be seen below receiving her award from Prof. Neil Champness.

 5: Tamara Mahmood who won the Seah Prize in the UK Surface Analysis Forum's Young Surface Analyst of the year competition 2017.  Her presentation and poster entitled “Physiochemical Characterisation of a Fully Bioresorbable Stent with a Drug Eluting Coating” is based on her BBSRC funded project with Arterius Ltd, a medical device company. Based from the School of Pharmacy and supervised by Prof Clive Roberts, Tamara utilised Raman spectroscopy to great effect to complement her broad materials characterisation data in localising and quantifying distinct chemical moieties relating to the biomedical devices.

Congratulations to all the prize winners from all at the nmRC for their amazing work!