Travel Award Recipient Habib Ullah

I had the pleasure of attending the 1st Solar Chemical Network Symposium in Liverpool on January 11th and 12th, 2024. It was a wonderful experience, and I truly valued the opportunity to be a part of it. Throughout the symposium, I gained valuable insights into catalysis, particularly in the context of CO2 reduction. This participation felt like a significant update for me. My primary research focus lies in Computational Modelling of catalysts, primarily utilized for water electrolysis and CO2 reduction. Therefore, the discussions and posters related to electrolysis and CO2 reduction were particularly beneficial. 

Travel Award details can be found here.

Dr Qiao He: Supported by SCN to attend our first Symposium in Liverpool

As a research associate based in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London, my research focuses on design and synthesis of new organic semiconductor materials. These materials are often photo-responsive and can be employed as a media to convert sunlight to energy devices. I have been interested in exploring my materials with other optoelectronic applications, such as utilizing solar energy to produce green chemicals, e.g. H2 but I have not gotten much experience on this topic.

When I saw the 1st UK Solar Chemicals Network Symposium is open for registration, I justified my attendance to the SCN committee. After 10 days when I received an invitation with the SCN Travel Award to financially support my trip, I felt absolutely honoured. Before the symposium, I dedicatedly prepared a conference poster for introducing myself and expected to know some collaborators from this community.

The talks were fantastic and covered many aspects of solar chemicals, from biocatalysts, electrocatalysis, semiconductor-based light harvesting, to carbon capture, etc. These talks with discussions provided me a good taste with the ongoing research, and I became more interested in conducing the H2 generation research related to organic semiconductors. I met a few old collaborators and friends (such as Prof. James Durrant, Dr. Flurin Eisner, Dr. Matyas Daboczi, etc) during this conference and talked with some potential collaborators. I am very grateful that this network symposium can bringing us together to inspire one another. I also had a great time walking through the ‘red brick’ University of Liverpool and the city when on the way from the symposium hotel back to the Liverpool Lime Street Station.

First Symposium, Directors Report

We were delighted to have more than 90 registrants for the first Solar Chemicals Symposium in January. The event was held over two days at Liverpool, close to the University campus. An important part of the meeting was to introduce the community to the approach and themes of the network (biocatalysis, electrocatalysis, light harvesting and device engineering & carbon capture). I am particularly grateful to our theme leads who gave excellent overviews of the topics and led the discussions around the opportunities within the scope of Solar to Chemicals.

Across the two days there was a wide range of invited and contributed talks covering all aspects of Solar Chemistry and it was inspiring to see the diversity and depth of scientific research that is occurring in the UK at the moment. A particular highlight was the poster session and special mention goes to Romain Tort of Imperial College London for winning the poster prize for his presentation titled “Searching for the Rules of Nitrogen Reduction”.

I hope all those who attended found it as exciting as I did and also enjoyed the positive and collaborative atmosphere that everyone generated. Scientific debate and discussion are critical in maintaining a healthy, functioning research field and throughout the meeting the questions and answer sessions were a real highlight with thoughtful contributions from all involved.

We are already looking forward to our next event which will be a Biohybrids Workshop hosted by Professor Julea Butt and Dr Jenny Zhang at the University of East Anglia on the 4th July - save the date!