Nanoscale & Nanoscale Advances Blog

Nanoscale Horizons Poster Prize

Maya Khatun (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
Poster Title: “Effect of Water on the Electronic Structure and Optical Properties of Inosine Mutant DNA Stabilized Silver Cluster”

Maya Khatun was born in West Bengal, India. She received her bachelor’s (2014) and master’s (2016) degrees in chemistry from Aligarh Muslim University, India. In 2017, she joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, as a PhD student under Dr. Anoop Ayyappan. Her PhD research focuses on implementing a cluster-building algorithm using random search and the Tabu-Search algorithm to optimize atomic clusters, specifically studying nanoclusters of Pd, Au, and Pt. She also assesses various DFT and ab initio methods to identify efficient approaches for studying boron group clusters and gold thiolates. In 2023, she joined the Department of Physics at Jyväskylä University, Finland, as a postdoctoral researcher under Prof. Hannu Häkkinen. Her current research focuses on NIR-emitting, biocompatible nanosystems like DNA-wrapped silver clusters, emphasizing their electronic structure and physical properties for biomedical applications.

Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances Poster Prize

Yuto Fukumoto (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
Poster Title: “Synthesis of diphosphine-protected IrAu₁₂ cluster with open site(s) and linkage by diisocyanide linker”

Yuto Fukumoto received his B.S. degree from the University of Tokyo in 2023 and is currently a master’s student at the University of Tokyo under the supervision of Professor Tatsuya Tsukuda. He is interested in the synthesis of well-defined assemblies of metal clusters and the exploration of novel properties arising from these assemblies. He is currently developing a targeted synthesis of ligand-bridged assemblies of gold clusters with predefined open sites for bridging.