PUMP PRIME
Pump Prime awards are available to encourage exploration of speculative new research. Many of the awards have provided opportunities for researchers in the Department to collaborate with colleagues in other departments and establish longer-term research activities with follow-on funding.
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he Pump Prime scheme provides funding of up to ÂŁ50k to seed new research activities, with grants available to academics in the Department and collaborators from other departments. The scheme encourages proposals that are innovative, with potential for high impact and that would be difficult to fund through conventional routes. To date, nine awards have been granted with a further two due to start later this year. Two of the grants that have recently been completed are summarised below, in both cases the work will continue through follow-on funding; an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship obtained by Dr Malcolm Connolly and a joint PhD student to work with Dr Erika Eiser and Professor Clare Grey. New colloidal materials for battery and photonic applications Dr Erika Eiser (Optoelectronics Group) and Professor Clare Grey (Department of Chemistry) For many applications, it is desirable to design porous materials containing nano-scale channels that can be controlled both in size and in chemical functionality. Examples are porous electrodes or thin films with tuneable photonic properties. The present project aims to develop such materials, starting from colloidal particles that have been functionalised with single-stranded
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Fig.1. SEM image of a colloidal gel of DNAfunctionalized gold nanopaticles taken in a liquid cell. The particles functionalization is depicted in the inset: single-stranded DNA with a flexible spacer of 15 thymines (T; yellow) is attached to the gold surface via a thiol bond. Half of the particles carry a sticky end (orange) while the other carries the complementary strand (blue), allowing for reversible binding between the colloids.
DNA. Colloids coated with complementary DNA will stick together as the DNA strands hybridise. We use short strands of DNA attached to colloids to build new functional materials. During the past year we have explored the formation of porous structures from a variety