News & Events

The 5th edition of the UK SFN was hosted at Newcastle University on the 26/27th January 2017. The meeting was organised in two days in which the first day PhD students and early career postdocs presented their work by oral, flash and poster presentations. Overall, 60 people attended the event with an excellent quality of the research presented covering a broad range of topics within solar fuels. The attendees saw research going from engineering and modelling of water-splitting reactors, new porous materials for light harvesting applications, to advanced spectroscopic techniques for molecules and materials characterization and computational tools in polymer photocatalysis. 

The main symposium on the 27th hosted more than 90 people coming from universities across the UK and attended a very compressed programme with the following invited speakers. Prof Graetzel at EPFL gave the Centenary Prize Lecture and received the medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry for “his pioneering contributions in molecular photovoltaics and mesoscopic solar cells”. Dr Symes (University of Glasgow), Dr Haussener (EPFL) and Dr Zwijnenburg (University College London) gave their talks on electrochemical tools for water splitting, multi-scale guidelines for photoelectrochemical reactors and the development of polymeric photocatalysts using a combined computational and experimental approach. At the end, Prof Devens (Arizona State University) whom his expenses were funded by the ESED Division, gave a great talk summarising the contributions of Prof Anthony Harriman (Newcastle University) to the field of Artificial Photosynthesis in a very special session that concluded with the presentation of a glass trophy. 

The symposium was also sponsored by Energy&Environmental Science and Sustainable Energy&Fuels that awarded prizes to the best oral and poster presentations to Dr Moritz Kuehnel (Cambridge University) and Yvonne Choo (Newcastle University), respectively. In addition, Nature Energy, Sigma-Aldrich Merck and Alvatek also supported the organisation of the meeting and representatives of each attended the symposium.

Overall, the event was a success with a high participation and impressive quality of research and, most important, it was clear that solar fuels has an excellent cohort of young scientists that will be able to tackle the problem in new and imaginative ways.