PCCP Blog

This lectureship is awarded to recognise and support emerging scientists working in physical chemistry, chemical physics or biophysical chemistry, who are making outstanding contributions to their field at an early stage of their career. In 2021, nominations were open to all and were made by leading researchers from around the world. After careful deliberation, Dr Basile Curchod (University of Bristol)  was selected as the 2022 recipient by the PCCP Editorial Board. In addition, the  shortlisted nominees are invited to contribute to an Emerging Investigators themed collection, which will be published in 2023.

Basile F. E. Curchod was born in Vevey (Switzerland) and has been profoundly intrigued by the interaction between light and molecules since his studies at EPFL (Switzerland). During his PhD, he worked on developing theoretical tools to better understand photochemical reactions, that is, chemical reactions triggered by light. He carried on his research on this topic during two postdoctoral stays, one at Stanford University (USA) and the other at the Max Planck Institute in Halle (Germany). He then moved to Bristol (UK) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow to work alongside experimentalists, applying his theoretical methods to understand the mechanistic details of some photochemical processes. In November 2017, he created the In Silico Photochemistry Group at Durham University (UK). In September 2018, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant. He was promoted to Associate Professor in August 2021.

In March 2022, Basile moved to the Centre for Computational Chemistry at the University of Bristol as an Associate Professor in Theoretical Chemistry. Basile is the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Marlow Award.

“Our group at the University of Bristol pursues a wide range of research interests, all aiming at studying the photochemistry and photophysics of molecules in silico. Its main interest resides in the development of trajectory-based methods for nonadiabatic quantum dynamics, and their extension to the description of light/matter interaction. Employing these developments and cutting-edge strategies to accelerate electronic-structure calculations, our group aims at understanding the importance of non-Born-Oppenheimer effects in atmospheric photochemical reactions (gas and aqueous phase) and the role played by athermal processes in the formation of photoproducts following a nonradiative decay.”
For more information on the In Silico Photochemistry Group, see the website www.in-silico-photochem.com and Twitter @insilphotochem

Dr Basile Curchod is awarded a travel bursary of £1000 to attend and give a lecture at a leading international event in 2023, where he will be presented his Lectureship award.

Many congratulations to Dr Basile Curchod on behalf of the PCCP Editorial Board, Editorial Office and Ownership Societies.

Nominations for the 2023 PCCP Emerging Investigator Lectureship will open this month, keep up to date with latest journal news on the blog, Twitter, newsletter and e-TOC alerts.

We are now inviting submissions for this exciting themed collection, Insights into 2D Materials. We encourage all types of PCCP articles – Communications, Full Papers and Perspectives.

2D materials with atomic scale thinness have emerged as a new form of nanomaterial. While graphene was the focus of early studies, since 2010 hundreds of other types of 2D materials have been investigated. This includes elemental 2D materials such as phosphorene, borophene, silicene and antimonene, as well as compound materials such as transition metal chalcogenides and oxides, hexagonal boron nitride, MXenes, and organic-inorganic metal halide layered perovskites. The large number of materials and the many different ways they can be combined to form heterostructures offer a great opportunity to transform materials science and technology, and benefit society.

The goal of this themed collection is to highlight the latest developments in this exciting field. The collection welcomes new insights into 2D materials from theoretical, computational, and experimental communities. This collection will cover topics including, but not limited to, physical and chemical properties of 2D materials, synthesis techniques, structural characterization, 2D and mixed-dimensional heterostructures, functionalization of 2D materials, flexible 2D devices, new novel 2D materials, and applications of 2D materials in biological systems, chemical sensing, and energy technologies.

Following our fair and impartial peer-review, accepted articles will be published online in a citeable form as soon as they are ready. The articles will then be assembled on the RSC Publishing platform and promoted as a web-based thematic collection, to permit readers to consult and download individual contributions from the entire series. We aim to publish and promote the completed collection during 2021. PCCP is a high-impact, international journal publishing cutting-edge original work in physical chemistry, chemical physics and biophysical chemistry. For more information on the journal, please visit the journal homepage.

The deadline for submissions is 16^th July 2021

If you have any questions, please contact the Editorial Office at PCCP-RSC@rsc.org

We recently published our first Tutorial Review in PCCP, Lifting the lid on the potentiostat: a beginner’s guide to understanding electrochemical circuitry and practical operation.  We’re excited to introduce this new review format for PCCP, which will appeal to younger researchers and established researchers seeking new fields to explore. Tutorial Reviews provide an essential introduction to a particular area of physical chemistry.

If you would like to write one, please email the PCCP Editorial Office at PCCP-RSC@rsc.org with an outline of your idea.

To celebrate our first Tutorial Review, we interviewed Julie MacPherson, the lead author on the article.

What inspired you to write this article?
Electrochemistry is enjoying a renaissance with the science at the heart of many energy conversion methods, as well as use in electrosynthesis and electroanalysis etc. The upshot is more and more people, from a variety of different disciplines are undertaking practical electrochemical experiments. At the heart of many measurements is the potentiostat. Back in the day it would have been common for PhD students to build their own potentiostat, and by doing this, would have forced the user to really understand how a potentiostat works and how the experiment should be set up to avoid pitfalls in experimental design and data interpretation. These days, unless the electrochemical experiment is more specialist purchasing a commercial potentiostat(s) for the research group is the normal, with instruments designed to be as easy as possible to operate. However this can mean that some of the more fundamental understanding is missing, and can be challenging to get to grips with especially for those that are coming into electrochemistry without a formal electronics training. Whilst in many electrochemistry text books, there is often a chapter near the end of the book outlining the electronic circuits in a potentiostat, the knowledge assumed is often beyond the beginning electrochemist. After many conversations with group members over the years and other academics, I really wanted to write an article which addressed this topic but started from a basic level and worked upwards.

How did you go about the writing process?
I assembled a team comprising Dr. Alex Colburn, an electronics expert in the Chemistry Department at Warwick, who has built many of the very low current instrumentation systems for the high resolution electrochemical imaging measurements Pat Unwin carries out, my colleague Dr. Danny O’Hare from Imperial College London, who himself has built many potentiostats and has also seen first-hand the issues that arise when people don’t understand how they work and my PhD student Katie Levey, who came into doing a PhD with limited electronics experience. Critical to the writing process were the undergraduate and PhD student focus groups (the names of the students involved appear in the acknowledgments) we set up from Warwick and Imperial. We met with them regularly to discuss whether the text was understandable for a beginner’s point of view, to highlight the issues they had experienced working with potentiostats and the questions they would want answering.

Who is it aimed at?
Masters and PhD students undertaking electrochemical research especially those with only basic electronics experience, but in general anyone who just wants to understand how their potentiostat actually works. This includes those working with electrochemical systems in industry. It is (hopefully!) a useful article as well for anyone teaching electrochemistry and is open access. The article also offers lots of practical tips for people who have run into issues with their electrochemical experiment and for those interested in how to reduce noise in the electrochemical experiment. There is also lots of useful practical information, especially on noise troubleshooting, in the supporting information.

What are the main points that you would like readers to take away from your review?
The first and foremost is the reader feels they better understand how a potentiostat works and it has both challenged them to think more about how they set up experimental electrochemistry experiments and how to trouble shoot problems. We also want it to give people more confidence in their understanding.

What is your lab currently working on?
My group is mainly focused on applications of boron doped diamond as an electrode material, this ranges from designing more robust and long-lasting sensors, using electrochemistry as a means of fabrication of useful metallic and metal oxide nanostructures, to working with corrosion free carbon catalyst supports for electrocatalysis. However, I also have a keen interest in chemical education and I am involved with a new series of Chemistry text books (Chemistry Study Guides), which just launched in October 2020 by the RSC aimed at undergraduates but written by academics in partnership with undergraduate students.

Do you have any thoughts about the future direction of the field?
There are more papers coming out now where people are providing methods for DIY potentiostats, which are aimed at low cost, portable, wireless operation via e.g. a smart phone. We hope the paper will encourage experimenters to have a go at building their own instrumentation and equip them with the tools to know where the potential pitfalls might be.

Thanks for an interesting insight into the field, Julie, and congratulations on your publication!

You can read the article, free to access, here.

Dr Stella Stopkowicz and Dr Stefania Impellizzeri have been selected as the winners of the 2021 PCCP Emerging Investigator Lectureship Award.

We are delighted to let you know that due to the additional difficulties faced by emerging investigators in raising their profile during the COVID-19 pandemic and the high quality of nominations, we have decided to grant two Lectureship Awards for 2021.

As part of the Lectureship, Dr Stopkowicz and Dr Impellizzeri will each be awarded £1,000 to attend and present at a leading international event in 2021, where they will also be presented with their individual Lectureship awards. They have also been invited to contribute a Perspective article to PCCP.

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In 2020, nominations were open to all and were made by leading researchers from around the world. After careful deliberation, Dr. Stella Stopkowicz (University of Mainz, Germany) and Dr. Stefania Impellizzeri (Ryerson University, Canada) were selected as the 2021 recipients by the PCCP Editorial Board. In addition, a number of the outstanding shortlisted nominees were selected and will be invited to contribute to the themed collection, which will be published in 2021.

Stella Stopkowicz received her PhD in theoretical chemistry from the University of Mainz (Germany). She joined the University of Oslo (Norway) for a postdoctoral stay in 2012. In 2015 she became a junior group leader at the University of Mainz. In 2017 and 2018 she has been a fellow at the Centre of Advanced Study in Oslo (Norway) within the project ‘molecules in extreme conditions’. In 2021 she will be a fellow at the Kavli Institue of Physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara (USA) on a White Dwarf related project. Her research group focuses on the development and the application of highly-accurate quantum-chemical methods with a focus on relativistic effects and the treatment of atoms and molecules in strong magnetic fields.

Stefania Impellizzeri is Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Biology of Ryerson University. She received a Laurea in Chemistry from the University of Bologna with Alberto Credi, with a thesis project in collaboration with 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient, Sir James Fraser Stoddart. Following a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Miami with Françisco Raymo, she joined the research group of organic photochemist Juan C. (Tito) Scaiano at the University of Ottawa as postdoctoral fellow where she was awarded a Banting PDF fellowship. Dr Impellizzeri’s research focuses on the design and synthesis of switchable fluorescent probes for bioimaging, sensing and molecular computing, the discovery of new strategies to couple molecules and nanostructured materials, and the analysis of modern optical phenomena at the interface between organic chemistry and the chemical physics of materials and nanostructured objects.

Many congratulations to Dr Stopkowicz and Dr Impellizzeri on behalf of the PCCP Editorial Board, Office and Ownership Societies.

Nominations for the 2022 PCCP Emerging Investigator Lectureship will open next summer, keep up to date with latest journal news on the blog, Twitter, newsletter and e-TOC alerts.