Picture diary

More or less in reverse chronological order. Also pictures from before 2017.

Some pictures of people (and things) in 2025

28 December 2025: Brocken spectres under the summit of Ben Lomond and, a little bit later, a chat with Chemistry undergrad Dr. David Mansfield.

16 December 2025: Spooky looking fog over the river Kelvin...

25 November 2025: The new Engineering building in front of my office is taking shape.

30 October 2025: Goodbye lunch in Stravaigin for Dr. Ankita Das who is off for a position with Prof. Melanie M. Britton at the University of Birmingham. With Zhiyu Liao, Ankita, Laure-Anne Hayes, Ben Russell, and Klaas Wynne.

5 September 2025: Ben showing off our new fancy ball milling machine.

29 May 2025: Ben putting a tiny sample on a DSC chip for our new Flash DSC2.

28 March 2025: Goodbye dinner for Pablo Docampo. With Will, Pablo, Smita, Adrian, Gordon, Joy, Claire, Klaas, Malcolm, and Hans.

Some pictures of people (and things) in 2024

11 December 2024: Chemical Photonics christmas dinner, with (at our table) Ben Russell, Chris Syme, Ankita Das, Smita Odedra, Laure-Anne Hayes, Mario González-Jiménez, and Klaas Wynne.

30 June 2024: Profs. Howe-Siang Tan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) and Yoshitaka Tanimura (Kyoto) were at the CMDS conference in York and came over to Glasgow to walk up Ben Nevis.

Taka in the fog somewhere reasonably close to teh summit.

Howe-Siang, me, Guus Wynne, and Taka at the summit cairn.

Beer and pizza after.

27 June 2024: Some cool time-resolved rheology (DMA) experiments with Ben, Manlio Tassieri, and Andrea Jannina Fernandez.

1 May 2024: Our Boson peak paper being discussed in the Annual Report of teh Research Center for Thermal and Enropic Science (Osaka University).

15 March 2024: Group lunch in Ramen Dayo

Some pictures of people (and things) in 2023

15 December 2023: Physical Chemistry christmas dinner with Zhiyu, Beth, ?, Affar, Ben, Chris, Adrian, Malcolm, and Pablo

11 December 2023: Celebrating the acceptance of Mario's paper in JACS.

2 December 2023: UCP group (early) christmas lunch

With Laure-Anne, Bethany Burt (project student), Mario, Zhiyu, Chris, Ben, and me

28 November 2023: Physical Chemistry dinner with Hans, Gordon, Beth, Affar, Pablo, Adrian, Frances, Malcolm, and me

13 October 2023: Physical Chemistry piss up... (me, Pablo, Adrian, Hans, Malcolm, and Dave)

August 2023: GRC on Liquids

30 July - 4 August: The Gordon Conference on the Chemistry and Physics of Liquids.

On teh way to teh conference: Nederland!

On the way back home obligatory mountain to run up: Bierstadt (4,287 m, 14,065ft)

14 July 2023: The Telluride Vibrational Dynamics meeting

12 June 2023: TRVS in Amsterdam. Huib Bakker in front of the TRVS logo I designed.

Bitterballen time!

Conference dinner with Ted

Lunch in the red light district

24 May 2023: Ben soldering in a dry box...

25 March 2023: Physical Chemistry section dinner in Ka Pao with KW, Gordon Hedley, Pablo Docampo, Adrian Lapthorn, Hans Senn, Smita Odedra, Malcolm Kadodwala, and Affar Karimula.

24 March 2023: Zhiyu, Ben, and Ankita in the little museum in the Kerr building

2 March 2023: Some interestign x-ray data to look at!

24 Februarary 2023: Chemical Photonics RA and PhD student night out

Mario, Zhiyu, Ben, and Ankita

Some pictures of people (and things) in 2022

16 December 2022: Christmas lunch of the Chemical Photonics group at Elena's Spanish bar & Restaurant

28 October 2022: Moody skies over the Gilbert Scott Building

20 September 2022: We were welcoming new postdoc Dr. Ankita Das to the group today!

9 September 2022: Is this FTIR cute or what?!

8 August 2022: Met with the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Karol van Oosterom to talk about scientific cooperation between Scotland and the Netherlands (also with Esther Mijers and Job Thijssen of the University of Edinburgh and embassyc staff member Laura van Voorst Vader). I clearly dressed up for the occasion...

20 May 2022: Slightly delayed (...) Christmas lunch ðŸŽ…ðŸŽ„ of the Chemical Photonics group in Mother India. No crackers ðŸ˜¢ but lovely food! ðŸ¥˜With Malcolm Kadodwala, Affar Karimula, Hans Senn, Mario, Zhiyu, and many more.

19 May 2022

Dr. NicolÃ¡s Flores-GonzÃ¡lez preparing a sample for ssNMRunder argon. Amazing he could get the tiny screw cap into the NMR insert correctly with three layers of gloves! Sample off to collaborators in Slovenia to be measured.

20 April 2022

BBC Arabic was visiting the lab to report on our mosquito spectroscopy work published recently in Nature Communications. With Mario and Francesco

4 March

Dim Sum in the Dim Sum Restaurant with Chris (who took the picture), Ben, Zhiyu, KW, and Mario

3 March

Sunset over the Kelvingrove Museum

3 March

The Anton Paar MCR 702e rheometer with temperature control from -160 to +600C is all up and running now.

With Ben

11 February

Drinks to celebrate Andy Farrell passing his PhD viva on 3 Feb. with Mario, Nicki, Andy, KW, Ben, Chris, and Zhiyu.

Champagne earlier in the lab

9 February

Wahey, our lovely new Anton Paar rheometer has arrived!

Some pictures of people (and things) in 2021

29 November

PhD student Sarah Huynen has become the first person in the 25-year history of the UCP research group to have done a chemical synthesis! We only own lasers and things like that (possibly a couple of lab coats), but Dr. JoÃ«lle Prunet was kind enough to let us use her lab

29 October

Chemical Photonics (super) group meeting

26 October

Zhiyu at the confocal Raman microscope and optical tweezing set-up he has built.

29 September

Ben, Mario, and I had 24 hours on beamline I22 at the Diamond Light Source. This was Ben and Mario's first time at the DLS.

Mario at the WAXS/SAXS set-up

Our sample cryogenically cooled in a Linkam stage.

Social distancing...

Ben placing a sample in teh Linkam stage

Data!

24 September

Desirable numberplate...

28 August 2021

Cloud inversion over Loch Lomond (just north of Glasgow)

20 June 2021

Watchign the partial solar eclipse from the office (with Mario, Zhiyu, Ben, and Sarah)

26 May 2021

Celebrating that Mario's G4 paper got accepted by PCCP with some Patxaran (a sloe-flavoured liqueur)

18 January 2021

Whiteboard...

15 January

Zoom group meeting. Zhiyu, me, Chris, Ben, Sarah, Mario, and Nikita.

some pictures of people (and things) in 2020

11 November 2020

Playing around using phase separation and dyes with Sarah Huynen. Might use this for lectures but is also inspiration for research.

9 September 2020

Polarisation microscopy photo of a spherulite in n-butanol taken by Chris Syme.

17 August 2020

Zhiyu Liao's tweezing set-up allowing Raman scattering is starting to shape up nicely.

8 April 2020

The "new normal": academic staff meeting via Zoom (BTW, I'm not really drinking a beer at 11am!)

31 March 2020

Some chemistry at home with my son Guus

13 March 2020

Mario cleaning up the corridor to the labs after a student visitor might have Covid-19

10 March 2020

Our new dynamic light scattering (DLS) machine was installed today. Ben Russell helping

2 March 2020

Visited project student at Daresbury lab and got to see the free electron laser, which is pretty impressive.

On the way home, tried a quick dash up Striding Edge on Helvellyn in the Lake District. Made it all the way to the hard climb down but got scared off by the final snowy slope.

some pictures of people (and things) in 2019

31 December 2019: Inversion over Loch Lomond on a run up and down Ben Lomond

Loch Lomond

Loch Lomond from the summit of Ben Lomond

10 December 2019: Congratulations to Finlay Walton who passed his PhD viva today with minor corrections. Thanks to external Andy Alexander and internal Adrian Lapthorn.

Finlay Walton PhD

6 October 2019: Quick run up Beinn an Lochain

Beinn an Lochain

Run up Beinn an Lochain

20 September 2019: Celebrating that our mosquito spectroscopy / machine learning paper was wfinally accepted, with Frencesco Baldini and Mario GonzÃ¡lez JimÃ©nez.

Francesco Baldini, Mario GonzÃ¡lez JimÃ©nez, and Klaas Wynne

18 September, 2019: Last ULTRA/Octopus access panel meeting at RAL/LFS in Didcot.

Didcot

August 2019: ACS meeting and JACS editorial board meeting in San Diego. Was interogated on chemistry and crystal nucleation by imigration in Salt Lake...

Salt Lake city

Ice cream with Damien Laage, errrrr Swiss guy, Erik Nibbering, and Mischa Bonn.

ACS San Diego ice cream

July 2019: Telluride Research Conference on vibrational spectrosocpy. Ran up Mt Elbert (4400m) afterwards.

Mt Elbert summit.

On the summit of Mt. Elbert

12 April, 2019: Multi-way multi-continent Skype meeting with our collaborators Heather Ferguson, Francesco Baldini, Roger Sanou, Fredros Okumu, Doreen Siria, and Simon Babayan.

29 March, 2019: On our way to the 2019 Ultrafast Chemical Physics in Scotland meeting in Edinburgh. Mario is wearing his Nature Chemistry USB key...

Mario is wearing his Nature Chemistry USB key

20 March, 2019: Got the news that my ERC Advanced grant was funded! â‚¬2.5M to study the use of optical tweezing to control (crystal) nucleation.

ERC Advanced grant Klaas Wynne

7 March, 2019: Uh, oh! Our laser table is being moved, so they can build a temporary wall, so teh windows of the labs can be changed. Will be bit of a mess for a while...

Mario crying...

26 February, 2019: Talk in teh Chemistry departmemt at Oxford and time for another run along the river in the morning cold.

3-5 February, 2019: Work visit to Lyon (talk at teh Solvate Workshop) but also some time for a long run through the city and over two of its big hills.

Lyon

14 January, 2019: Undergrad Jamie McEwem and PhD student Finlay Walton discovered a different crytsalline phase of TPP. With Claire Wilson, they discovered it was a new polymorph that turns out to be really important for another story. More later...

9 January, 2019: Was handed the RSC Chemical Dynamics award at the SDG meeting

Chemical Dynamics award

some pictures of people (and things) in 2018

22 December, 2018: Our mosquito work made it into the christmas (22 December 2018) issue of The Economist. Fraunhofer lines?!?! Anyway, the gist is about right and at least they mention Mario GonzÃ¡lez JimÃ©nez and Fredros Okumu.

Mosquito story

17-20 October, 2018: Experiments on beamline B22 at the Diamond Light Source. Me, Finlay Walton, John Bolling, and Andrew Farrell in the B22 lab.

Setting up the experiments with Gianfelice CinqueÂ

Finlay doing some tweaking

The Diamond Light Source is big...

Finlay attempting to set a KOM around teh accelerator

Yay!! The results we were looking for!

19-31 August, 2018: JACS meeting Boston, SPIE meeting San Diego, ICORS 2018 in Jeju. Boston during early morning run.

Uh oh...

Conference dinner ICORS 2018

Mmm nice Korean food!

4 August 2018: Spot of glacier/mountain running...

29 June 2018: Mario and me submitting the mosquito paper, finally!

Mosquito paper

15 June: Watching football world cup...

1-8 April 2018: Visit to our collaborators at the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania.

Mario disappointed that water doesn't drain clockwise south of the equator (at Kilimanjaro airport)

Mario boarding the little plane from Dar es Salam to Ifakara.

The region around Ifakara is fertile and wet, hence mosquitoes and malaria.

Made it after they got the cows off the runway...

Early morning run

Pfff, I only distracted him a bit...

5 March 2018: Yay, at 4pm our Nature Chemistry paper "Control over phase separation and nucleation using a laser-tweezing potential" came out.

Nature Chemistry: Control over phase separation and nucleation using a laser-tweezing potential

8 February 2018: Some random lab pictures. Finlay Walton using the Olympus microscope.

Liquid-liquid phase separation in a mixture of nitrobenzene-decane with a bit of methylene blue dye added.

Sitting on a cold block.

Andy Farrell operating the cryostat in the FTIR used to look for liquid-liquid transitions in water.

Also pictures from before 2017.

26 March 2026: New preprint from our collaboration with Adam Dobson's lab at Glasgow: can an organism's chemical fingerprint predict how it will respond to stress? Yes. Using ATR-FTIR spectroscopy + machine learning — methods developed in my group by Mario González-Jiménez — the team shows that "chemotypes" barcode biological variation (sex, genotype, diet, ageing) in Drosophila and, most excitingly, predict starvation resistance in independent populations *before* exposure. The logic: metabolism integrates diverse drivers of biological variation, so aggregate chemistry encodes phenotype. FTIR reads it cheaply and fast; ML decodes it. FTIR already works with human biofluids, so the path toward personalised prediction of treatment response is plausible. Wonderful to see our IR/ML methods from vector biology applied in a completely new context. Congratulations Rita Ibrahim, Mario González-Jiménez, Adam Dobson and the team. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.22.713522v1
26 February 2026: We show that configurational entropy can suppress crystallisation in multicomponent molecular systems, leading to vitrification beyond a critical component number. This provides an entropy-based route to stable molecular glasses and high-entropy amorphous drugs (HEADs). https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.15000448/v1This work was funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.
3 February 2026: In close collaboration with Daniel Kuroda (Louisiana State), we use terahertz spectroscopy to reveal phonon-like collective vibrations in highly concentrated lithium electrolytes, indicating transient crystalline-like order and a hopping mechanism for lithium transport. https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.10001873/v1 This work was funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.
28 January 2026: With Rebecca Beveridge, we introduce a rapid screening approach to predict co-crystal, co-amorphous, or phase-separated outcomes by analysing noncovalent oligomers in solution using nanoelectrospray mass spectrometry. https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.10001669/v1 This work was funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.
22 January 2026: With Rebecca Beveridge and Ian MacLaren, we show that common inorganic salt solutions contain persistent amorphous ion aggregates, even in undersaturated conditions, challenging the textbook picture of dilute electrolytes and nucleation. https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-x4kh4/v2 This work was funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.
29 July 2024: Our paper was featured by the RSC: Amorphous clusters across a vast range of sizes found to affect crystal nucleation.
10 July 2024: Just out in ChemicalScience https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SC00452C our work on the general role of amorphous aggregates in crystal nucleation in collaboration with the Rebecca Beveridge group at Strathclyde. Surprisingly, the amorphous aggregates have a vast range of sizes from molecular to mesoscopic. These results are explained by a simple two-step nucleation model successfully accounting for our and previous results in the literature. This ties in with our recent study of concentrated salt solutions pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja We consistently find that solutions are far from homogeneous with implications to nucleation and other material properties.
20 February 2024: Pleased with the publication of https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0169326 in Review of Scientific Instruments. Need to do rheology on an air sensitive sample? Use our 3D-printed cup filled with heavier-than-air gas such as sulfur hexafluoride or xenon to keep the air out! Simple but effective. We used this in our recent paper https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.3c07110 on a double glass transition in (moisture reactive) titanium alkoxides but also applicable to, for example, hygroscopic ionic liquids. By Ben Russell funded by ERC and EPSRC.
21 December 2023: Very excited by the publication of https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.3c09421 in JACS Characterising and manipulating the translational dynamics of water in aqueous salt solutions is critical to a wide range of technologies rom the initial stages of nucleation and crystallisation to the mechanism of ion transport in water-in-salt electrolytes for batteries. We have used ultrafast optical Kerr-effect spectroscopy to obtain very high-quality reduced Raman spectra in the gigahertz to terahertz range. This was applied to a range of chloride salts at concentrations as high as 15 M, where there are only ~2.5 (!) water molecules per ion pair. This has allowed us to provide clear evidence for two distinct populations of water molecules: those solvated by ions showing strongly slowed down dynamics and those with essentially unchanged bulk properties. This ties in with our recent work on supersaturated solutions https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2023-18zk5-v3 showing they are not homogeneous in the slightest.
2 October 2023: New PhD student Laure-Anne Hayes started today. She will start out working on some interesting cross-over between between molecular and soft-matter physics.
24 January 2023: A press release on our NatComm paper came out: SCIENTISTS OPEN NEW WINDOW ON THE PHYSICS OF GLASS FORMATION
16 January 2023: Our paper "Understanding the emergence of the boson peak in molecular glasses" has come out in NatureComms https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-35878-6. Most mysterious aspect of glass transition is the boson peak: a small effect but reflection of supramolecular structures responsible for formation of glass instead of crystal. Widely studied but poorly observed as obscured by other contributions. We used symmetry to get clean view of boson peak in tetrabutyl orthosilicate using Raman, a pre-peak in SAXS/WAXS, and boson peak in calorimetry. MD simulations (constrained by experiments) show boson peak caused by clusters of over-coordinated molecules.This opens way to investigation of detailed changes behaviour boson-peak & glasses in general as function temperature, pressure, fragility, & other physicochemical parameters. Fantastic collaboration with Gabriele Sosso (@SossoGroup) & PhD student Trent Barnard who did MD (@warwickchem) and the late Paul McMillan (@UCLChemistry). OKE by @magonji , rheology/DSC Ben Russell & undergrad Laure-Anne Hayes, DFT Nikita Tukachev & Hans Senn (@UofGChem),NMR Uroš Javornik & Gregor Mali (@kemijski ), SAXS/WAXS at the @DiamondLightSou with @evilokapi & Martin Wilding (@ChemistryCU), & calorimetry by Motohiro Nakano & Yuji Miyazaki (@ScienceOU).With funding from @ERC_Research #AdG, @LeverhulmeTrust , @DiamondLightSou , @EPSRC , @ARRS_rfo , HPC Midlands+ ConsortiumThe molecules were serendipitously "discovered" (in the @SigmaAldrich catalogue) by PhD student Andy Farrell & undergrad @NotchSg in 2019.
20 Sep 2022: Warm welcome to postdoc Dr. Ankita Das (PhD @TIFRScience & briefly @UofIllinois ) who will be working on laser-induced crystal nucleation funded by our ERC AdG CONTROL. She already has broad range of skills from synthesis to ultrafast lasers and plasmonics.
8 August 2022: Met with the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Karol van Oosterom to talk about scientific cooperation between Scotland and the Netherlands
27 June 2022: Our research on malaria and spectroscopy was featured on BBC Arabic Science programme
7 April 2022: Zhiyu’s lovely paper on the role of metastable amorphous intermediates in laser-induced nucleation has come out (ASAP) in JACS https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.1c11154 Laser-induced nucleation was first discovered in 1996 but never properly explained. We previously thought that it might be related to liquid-liquid phase separation. Now, in glycine at least, we have found that the key step is the formation of amorphous particles, which when touched by a laser trigger the nucleation of crystals. The preponderance of gamma glycine over alpha glycine in our experiments suggests that the laser action is through the Kerr effect. There are plenty of reasons to believe that both amorphous particle formation and its role in nucleation (laser induced or otherwise) are much more common, so expect to hear more about this sort of thing…
3 February 2022: Former PhD student Andrew Farrell passed his viva this morning with only minor corrections. Thanks to external Steve Meech (UEA Chemistry ) and internal Gordon Hedley.
16 June 2021: In our publication in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 23, 13250 – 13260 (2021), we use femtosecond optical Kerr-effect spectroscopy to determine the low-frequency Raman spectra of nucleotides and oligomeric DNAs with unrivalled dynamic range and signal-to-noise. These samples were carefully chosen to form G-quadruplexes, structures formed by four strands of DNA, under the appropriate conditions. We find that the G-quadruplexes exhibit a highly unusual group of gigahertz to terahertz highly underdamped delocalised vibrational modes. As these modes are near kBT/h at room temperature, they are expected to be the thermally excited modes required to understand the interaction of DNA with proteins. This provides a new perspective on the role of low-frequency vibrational modes in the biological function of DNA.
13 April 2020: Just accepted in JACS, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.0c01712, shows why liquid-liquid transitions happen: competition between different local molecular packings resembling crystal polymorphs results in transition from geometric frustration to kinetic frustration. Funded by @ERC_Research, @EPSRC, @LeverhulmeTrust, and @DiamondLightSou. So many contributions: PhDs @finlaywalton, John Bolling and Andy Farrell, RAs @heschemistrypro and @magonji, as well as Claire Wilson, Hans Senn, Gianfelice Cinque. And @UofGChem BSc undergrad Jamie McEwen who serendipitously found key that solved the mystery. And last but not least, our first ever crystal structure in the CCDC. F. Walton, J. Bolling, A. Farrell, J. MacEwen, C. Syme, M. González Jiménez, H. Senn, C. Wilson, G. Cinque, and K. Wynne, ‘Polyamorphism mirrors polymorphism in the liquid–liquid transition of a molecular liquid’, ChemRxiv (https://dx.doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.9891491.v2) and J. Am. Chem. Soc. in press (2020).
13 January 2020: We have a PhD positionin Chemistry for UK/EU nationals – Laser control over crystal nucleation – Closing Date: 1 April 2020
10 December 2019: Congratulations to Finlay Walton who passed his PhD viva today with minor corrections. Thanks to external Andy Alexander and internal Adrian Lapthorn.
4 October 2019: Finlay's paper "Using optical tweezing to control phase separation and nucleation near a liquid–liquid critical point" came out in Soft Matter, see https://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C9SM01297D.
16 September 2019: Our new paper "Prediction of mosquito species and population age structure using mid-infrared spectroscopy and supervised machine learning" has come out in Welcome Open Research 4, 76 (2019) doi: 0.12688/wellcomeopenres.15201.3 feauturing an international author list: Mario González Jiménez, Simon A. Babayan, Pegah Khazaeli1, Margaret Doyle, Finlay Walton, Elliott Reedy, Thomas Glew, Mafalda Viana, Lisa Ranford-Cartwright, Abdoulaye Niang, Doreen J. Siria, Fredros O. Okumu, Abdoulaye Diabaté, Heather M. Ferguson, Francesco Baldini, Klaas Wynne.
11 July, 2019: The School of Chemistry has a lectureship (assistant prof.) position in Physical Chemistry, see https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BTM762/lecturer-in-physical-chemistry …. The applicant’s research should strategically align with that of the Chemical Photonics Group (https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/chemistry/research/cp/ …). Closing date: 1 August 2019.
19 June, 2019: We have two postdoctoral position available now funded by the five-year European Research Council (ERC) funded project Laser Control over Crystal Nucleation (CONTROL), which aims to develop a novel platform for the manipulation of phase transitions, crystal nucleation, and polymorph control based on optical tweezing and plasmonic tweezing. Closing Date: 12 August 2019. More details here.
3 June 2019: A polarisation microscopy photo of a new polymorph of a molecular crystal growing into another polymorph won the EPSRC Science Photo Competition Eureka & Discovery category. Photo by @finlaywalton Manuscript in preparation... Research funded by @EPSRC
28 March 2019: KW has been awarded a €2.49M European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant: CONTROL - Laser control over crystal nucleation. We will use sophisticated light sources to “pull” crystals out of solution, control their properties, and thereby enable new applications in the pharmaceutical industry and elsewhere. See https://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2018-advanced-grants-results
28 January 2019: Maternity cover job opening (in principle 6 months), Editorial Support Assistant to assist KW as JACS associate editor, linked to the University of Glasgow, part time, see https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BPT274/editorial-support-assistant
22 December, 2018: Our mosquito work made it into the christmas (22 December 2018) issue of The Economist. Fraunhofer lines?!?! Anyway, the gist is about right and at least they mention Mario González Jiménez and Fredros Okumu.
29 November 2018: Today we were awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant, 'Delocalised phonon-like modes in organic and bio-molecules', jointly with Adrain Lapthorn and Hans Senn. This will fund our experimental work on delocalised modes in proteins and DNA as well as novel MD simulations.
1 October 2018: Delighted that today Josh Mitton is starting on a joint machine learning PhD project with Roderick Murray-Smith and Francesco Baldini (and unofficially but no less importantly Roman Biek, Simon Babayan, Lisa Ranford-Cartwright, Heather Ferguson, Adrian Lapthorn, and Simon Rogers)
2 August 2018: Judith's nice paper "Frustration vs Prenucleation: Understanding the Surprising Stability of Supersaturated Sodium Thiosulfate Solutions" came out in JPC B http://dx.doi.org/0.1021/acs.jpcb.8b04112
8 May 2018: KW is given the 2018 Chemical Dynamics Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry for outstanding contributions to time-resolved spectroscopy.
9 March 2018: Dr Mario González Jiménez wins the 2018 RSC Twitter Conference poster prize in the #RSCPhys category with https://twitter.com/magonji/status/970952685938757632
5 March 2018: Our paper "Control over phase separation and nucleation using a laser-tweezing potential", Nature Chemistry 10, 506 (2018) (http://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-018-0009-8) just came out!
2 March 2018: I am delighted to be able to announce that, funded by EPSRC, I have published a paper in J Phys Chem with a picture of a mayonnaise jar. See doi: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.8b01006. As promised, I will eat my hat with mayonnaise over the next few days.
2 January 2018: "The Mayonnaise Effect" is the #1 most read article in JPCLett of the past month. See http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b03207.
8 December 2017: My paper "The Mayonnaise Effect" came out in JPC Lett. See http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b03207.
29 November 2017: We have a prestigious Lord Kelvin-Adam Smith (LKAS) 4-year PhD studentship on “Machine learning in spectroscopy” available for UK, EU, and international students. We will combine expertise in chemistry, spectroscopy, entomology, and computing science to apply state-of-the-art machine-learning techniques to the determination of traits in insects and the design of novel molecules for attracting or repelling insects. The application deadline is 12 noon, Friday 12th January 2018. Much more information at https://tinyurl.com/y927jhpo.
27 October 2017: Wahey again! PhD student Judith Reichenbach passed her PhD viva today with her thesis "Structure and Dynamics in Ionic Liquids and Concentrated Salt Solutions: An Ultrafast Spectroscopy Study"! Thanks to external examiner Steve Meech, internal Steven Sproules, and convenor Adrian Lapthorn.
28 September 2017: Wahey! PhD student Joanna (Asia) Mosses passed her PhD viva today with her thesis 'Phase transitions and mesophases in molecular liquids and solutions: spectroscopic and imaging studies’'! A thank you also to the external examiner Mischa Bonn, internal Malcolm Kadodwala, and convenor Justin Hargreaves.
15 June 2017: Our paper "Spectrum of slow and super-slow (picosecond to nanosecond) water dynamics around organic and biological solutes" by Gopa Ramakrishnan, Mario González-Jiménez, Adrian Lapthorn, and Klaas Wynne, on the universally imhomogeneous solvation shell around solutes came out in J.Phys.Chem. Lett today. See http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b01127. Should be freely available soon.
31 May 2017: We got a paper out in JACS today "Phonon-like Hydrogen-Bond Modes in Protic Ionic Liquids". PhD student Judith's first paper in the best chemistry journal in the universe (... :-)) Also with PhD student Stuart Ruddell in David France's group, former undergrad Julio Lemes, David Turton, and Mario González. Download for free at http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.7b03036
19 April 2017: Our paper "Ultrafast 2D-IR and optical Kerr effect spectroscopy reveal the impact of duplex melting on the structural dynamics of DNA" came out in PCCP today. It's open access so download it for free. Collaboration with Neil Hunt and colleagues at Strathclyde and Paul Donaldson and colleagues at the STFC Central Laser Facility.
1 April 2017: Started as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS)!
17 February 2017: Our paper "Frustration of crystallisation by a liquid–crystal phase" came out in Scientific Reports today. Read more about this research: Frustrating liquid crystals and watch a movie about it on YouTube here.
November 2016: We are looking for somebody to join us as a PhD student to work on imaging and laser manipulation of nucleation phenomena. A great project on the border between physics,chemistry, and engineering.
1 October 2016: Andrew Farrell joined the group as a new PhD student to work on ultrafast spectroscopy.
5 July 2016: Spain's Consul General visits the group on invitation by Mario.
6 June 2016: A number of places have taken up our press release. Exclusive: Professor Klaas Wynne On Decoding DNA Sound Bubbles & Human Life on HealthAim.com is probably the weirdest. Also Vibraciones y burbujas de sonido del ADN son esenciales para la vida shown on the homepage of SINC.
1 June 2016: Our paper Observation of coherent delocalised phonon-like modes in DNA under physiological conditions was published to day in Nature Communications. See also Sound-like bubbles whizzing around in DNA are essential to life and a similar Glasgow University press release.
11 March 2016: Tommy Harwood successfully defended his thesis today at the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy & Biomedical Sciences (SIPBS). Tommy studied for his PhD under Elizabeth Ellis (SIPBS) and came to work in the UCP labs in 2012 to do terahertz spectroscopy of biomolecules and optical Kerr-effect spectroscopy of small biomolecules, proteins, and DNA. Although he is not officially our PhD student, in practice he did all the spectroscopy experiments under our supervision at Glasgow University. Check out our paper "Terahertz underdamped vibrational motion governs protein-ligand binding in solution" came out in Nature Communications.