Cohort-1

Amelia Jones

Amelia is a first-year PhD student researching barocaloric liquid crystals as a zero-carbon alternative for cooling and heating. Cooling and heating account for up to 50% of global emissions, making efficient, sustainable solutions critical. Barocaloric liquid crystals can reversibly store and release large amounts of energy, making them promising candidates for environmentally friendly cooling and heating systems that avoid the use of harmful gases. Her project is co-supervised by Xavier Moya in the Department of Materials and Alex Forse in the Department of Chemistry. It is partially funded by the UKRI and Barocal Ltd., which is at the forefront of developing these zero-carbon technologies.

Yida Wu

Yida is a PhD student in Henning Sirringhaus's lab. She is exploring structure–property relationships of organic thermoelectrics via material characterization and device fabrication. Her research aims to enhance thermoelectric performances of organic semiconductors through structural and architectural engineering.

Benjamin Hodgson

Benji is investigating highly disordered carbon systems for improved supercapacitor performance.

Emile Plompen

Emile is a PhD student in Chemical Engineering at StranksLab, focusing on advanced vapour deposition techniques to enable scalable fabrication of high-performance all-perovskite tandem solar cells. These devices combine multiple light absorber layers that harvest different parts of the solar spectrum, driving efficiencies well beyond those of conventional single-junction technologies like silicon photovoltaics.