The 2025/2026 academic year
Long time no posting…
The 2025/2026 academic year has come and gone and plenty has happened. Here are some highlights:
Alfie Gavagan joined as our inaugural PhD student, coming from Lancaster University’s Natural Sciences programme. Alfie has been incredibly productinve in his first 9 months, setting up ab initio molecular dynamics code on our HPC cluster, attending two beamtimes at FLASH in Hamburg, and ALLS in Montreal, and getting stuck into building our TOF-MS spectrometer.
Josh Spademan and Quin Blythe did their 4th year MSci research projects in our lab. Josh showed his natural apptitude for the experimental aspects of physical chemistry, making major contributions to the development of our new spectrometer and characterising its performance using SIMION. Quin was charged with analysing multi-mass ion imaging data and performing ab initio dynamics calculations to understand the dissociative ionisation dynamics of two different structural isomers of model biomolecules.
Both handled their projects superbly, and are both off to do PhD’s now; Josh will be working with Dr David Duncan at the i09 beamline at the Diamond Light Source, and Quin is joining Dr Raj Pandya’s group at the University of Cambridge. Just rewards for their excellent work this year.
We’ve also been joined by 3rd year undergraduate student, Charlie Maunder, as part of a Royal Society of Chemistry Summer Studentship. Charlie builds Tesla coils in his spare time, so we’re excited to see if it is possible to harness his powers for good.
More news to come in due course…
