Dyes and Pigments as Building Blocks for Novel High Performance Organic Semiconductors. Natural dyes and pigments are well known for their bright colours, photochemical and thermal stability, and cheap cost. Recently, the necessity of high performing materials in the organic electronics has stimulated a renaissance of these historical molecules and their subsequent derivatives into new families of ?-conjugated building blocks used to construct new donor-acceptor semiconductors. The aim of this p ....Dyes and Pigments as Building Blocks for Novel High Performance Organic Semiconductors. Natural dyes and pigments are well known for their bright colours, photochemical and thermal stability, and cheap cost. Recently, the necessity of high performing materials in the organic electronics has stimulated a renaissance of these historical molecules and their subsequent derivatives into new families of ?-conjugated building blocks used to construct new donor-acceptor semiconductors. The aim of this project is to explore various novel dyes, pigments and their derivatives for constructing outstanding materials for future organic electronics.Read moreRead less
Plasmonic nanoparticle catalysis for nitrogen-based synthesis. Light can generate an optical force to capture small objects. This requires intense light – a laser, which limits optical trapping in catalysis applications. This project aims to apply plasmonic nanoparticles with normal-intensity light to take advantage of plasmonic-generated optical forces for catalytic chemical synthesis. The optical trapping/releasing of small molecules is highly selective and responsive to molecule structure and ....Plasmonic nanoparticle catalysis for nitrogen-based synthesis. Light can generate an optical force to capture small objects. This requires intense light – a laser, which limits optical trapping in catalysis applications. This project aims to apply plasmonic nanoparticles with normal-intensity light to take advantage of plasmonic-generated optical forces for catalytic chemical synthesis. The optical trapping/releasing of small molecules is highly selective and responsive to molecule structure and so presents a great opportunity to radically alter chemical synthesis pathways, which will be illustrated with reactions on liquid-solid and gas-solid interfaces. This highly innovative strategy will be used to discover new nitrogen-based syntheses which are both fundamentally and industrially important.Read moreRead less
Overcoming antibiotic resistance: rapid discovery of new antibacterial drug targets using chemical proteomics. The prevalence of multidrug-resistant bacteria in the community is a critical public health issue and there is an urgent and compelling need for new antibiotics with novel modes of action to combat these deadly superbugs. While antibiotics from nature have long been a mainstay of the pharmaceutical industry, their development as drugs can be challenging as their cellular targets and mod ....Overcoming antibiotic resistance: rapid discovery of new antibacterial drug targets using chemical proteomics. The prevalence of multidrug-resistant bacteria in the community is a critical public health issue and there is an urgent and compelling need for new antibiotics with novel modes of action to combat these deadly superbugs. While antibiotics from nature have long been a mainstay of the pharmaceutical industry, their development as drugs can be challenging as their cellular targets and modes of action are frequently unknown. In this project, innovative chemical proteomics approaches will be used to rapidly identify and characterise the cellular targets and modes of action of both newly discovered and historic antibiotic natural products, thereby overcoming this bottleneck and accelerating the development of next-generation antibiotics.Read moreRead less