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.