Question 1

Danckwerts Pergamon 2026 award announced

Accepted Answer

Danckwerts Pergamon 2026 award announced

Dr Anna Scheeder has been awarded the 2026 Danckwerts Pergamon Prize for the best PhD thesis in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB).
The Danckwerts Pergamon Prize is awarded annually for the best PhD thesis submitted within CEB. Named in honour of Professor Peter Danckwerts, one of the department&#8217;s most influential figures, the prize recognises doctoral research that demonstrates exceptional scientific quality, originality and impact.
Anna completed her PhD in Professor Clemens Kaminski&#8217;s Laser Analytics research group and worked in close collaboration with Dr Ioanna Mela in the Department of Pharmacology. She received the prize for her research developing tiny drug-carrying particles (called nanocarriers) designed to make antibiotics more effective. She studied how they interact at the molecular level with bacterial targets using super resolution microscopy.
Anna has since moved to a postdoctoral position at University College London, where she is studying the nanoscale organisation of the bacterial envelope using atomic force microscopy.
She said: &#8220;I got the email from Clemens and I was so shocked with what it said – I&#8217;m very proud.”
Professor Clemens Kaminski, Head of Department, said: &#8220;Anna&#8217;s thesis is an outstanding piece of work that reflects both scientific excellence and the collaborative spirit of research at CEB. She brought together expertise from different disciplines and built strong partnerships to address a challenging problem.
“I am delighted to see her achievements recognised through the Danckwerts Pergamon Prize. It is a thoroughly deserved honour and a fitting acknowledgement of the quality and impact of her work.&#8221;
Anna added: “I knew I&#8217;d been nominated, but I did not expect to win.
“To know that other people think it&#8217;s good work is very validating for me. When you&#8217;re doing your PhD, you don&#8217;t often get feedback from outside your field and so this award is the biggest sign that other people can understand my work and that it translates well to a scientific audience, which is very important to me.&#8221;
Anna worked closely with Dr Ioanna Mela in the Department of Pharmacology, and the final paper resulting from her PhD was co-authored with Jon Ostolaza-Paraiso, then a PhD student in Professor David Fairen-Jimenez&#8217;s Adsorption and Advanced Materials group, with Professor Ljiljana Fruk also contributing to the project.
&#8220;It’s very multidisciplinary work, working with nanotechnology, DNA and MOFs. And I don&#8217;t know if I could have done it anywhere else, the facilities are fantastic at CEB. I had the flexibility and the equipment to do what I needed to do,&#8221; she said.
&#8220;I am the co-author on the paper and it was really exciting to have the mutual support of a partner to work alongside.&#8221;
Anna highlighted the department&#8217;s collaborative environment as she said: &#8220;I got lots of opportunities to work with academics and experts from different scientific backgrounds and it was invaluable to me, I&#8217;m really grateful for this.”
Looking back on her PhD, she added: &#8220;I enjoyed my PhD and I will remember it with great pride and hard work and the joy of working with very kind and very smart people.&#8221;
Anna also thanked those who supported her throughout the project, including Dr Edward Ward, Dr Jon Ostolaza-Paraiso, Professor Kaminski and Dr Mela as well as Dr Andrew Baker.
&#8220;Jon, without whom the collaboration wouldn&#8217;t have existed and the joy we shared together. I’m also grateful to Clemens and Ioanna for always being encouraging.&#8221;

Question 2

Meet CEB's new academic

Accepted Answer

Meet CEB&#8217;s new academic
																												
The Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology has welcomed Dr George Gordon to lead the new standalone MRes in Sensor Technologies and Applications course.
George officially joins the department today (20 July), having already spent the past few months settling in, meeting colleagues and preparing for the arrival of the course&#8217;s first students in October.
He also brings with him an established research group, the Optics and Photonics for clinical Translation, Imaging and Materials (OPTIM) which develops hair-thin optical imaging and sensing technologies designed to access parts of the body that are currently beyond the reach of conventional medical imaging.
The appointment marks a return to Cambridge for George, who moved here from New Zealand in 2009 to undertake a PhD. He met his wife during his time as a student, later worked in Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher and is now returning as a father of three.
&#8220;It&#8217;s going to be busy, but it does feel a bit like coming &#8216;home&#8217;,&#8221; he said.
George completed his undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Auckland before moving to Cambridge on a scholarship. He received his PhD in 2013 in wireless and optical telecommunications and later worked closely with Prof Sarah Bohndiek (Physics and CRUK Cambridge Institute) and Prof Tim Wilkinson (Electrical Engineering), building a fully holographic fibre endoscope and developing low cost imaging techniques to improve early cancer detection.
In 2019, he moved to the University of Nottingham to establish his own research group. A year later, he secured a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, which provided a huge boost and enabled him to build his own team focused on ambitious new approaches to biomedical imaging. Despite challenges during the lockdown pandemics, struggling to build the necessary network to both capture and
Getting started, however, coincided with the disruption of the pandemic. He said: &#8220;I didn&#8217;t know anyone and it was hard both professionally and personally. I wanted to focus on imaging things that no one has imaged before, but that&#8217;s quite difficult when you don&#8217;t know anyone to give you things to image. But we got there.”
Through these eventual collaborations with colleagues in a hospital setting, George&#8217;s team were able to identify a major opportunity to apply their technology to challenges such as the early detection of pancreatic cancer, and a new direction for the group&#8217;s hair-thin optical sensors.
George now leads research developing these optical and nanoscale technologies for biomedical applications, with the focus remaining on creating sensors capable of accessing parts of the body that remain difficult to image.
Alongside relocating his research group, he is also taking on the challenge of leading a brand new course, the MRes in Sensor Technologies and Applications.
&#8220;I&#8217;m very excited to be starting in the role, and moving my research group into the fantastic facilities here at CEB,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It&#8217;s been really fun so far reconnecting with old colleagues and meeting new ones, which has helped me to already start to feel more settled.
&#8220;I&#8217;ve already had some really fascinating discussions with some of our academics and discussed several areas where I think my research group could really offer some insight or even collaborative projects.&#8221;
Meanwhile, George will bring innovative thinking to the lecture rooms as he considers how developments in artificial intelligence are changing the way sensor technologies should be taught.
&#8220;Assessments are going to have to be done differently going forward,&#8221; he said.
&#8220;AI is forcing us to think differently about how we teach and how we prepare students to use it. For me, this is about teaching the students to develop the judgement and intuition needed to critically evaluate AI-generated outputs. I want to teach them how to use AI responsibly and robustly, rather than pretending they aren’t going to use it.
“A lot of sensor work is coding, and in the past few years AI has fundamentally changed how we do that. We need to reflect that in the way we teach the subject.&#8221;
Outside work, George says his family keeps him happily busy. He and his wife have three young children, two boys and a girl aged seven, four and two, who he describes as his pride and joy.
Professionally, though, there is plenty to get started on straight away.
&#8220;It&#8217;s going to be an intense start, I will only have a few months before we welcome the first group of students, but I know my new colleagues in the CEB and the broader Sensors CDT team will be a vital support for me,&#8221; he said. “I should be able to hit the ground running, having spent the past seven years building and leading my own research team and delivering teaching on AI tools. I have also recently been awarded some new funding that will provide a real boost to my research programme as I start at Cambridge.”

Question 3

Improving LEDs

Accepted Answer

Improving colour and efficiency in LEDs
Latest research into halide perovskites has demonstrated a way to achieve ultranarrow emission linewidths in solution-processed thin films, improving colour purity in perovskite LEDs across the blue-to-green spectrum.
The paper, published in Nature Synthesis, shows that narrower emission produces more saturated, precisely defined colours, which could lead to improvements in display technologies – such as televisions – where accurate colour reproduction and low energy loss are both key requirements.
The research, led by Jian Mao during a Marie Curie Fellowship in Professor Sam Stranks’s Optoelectronic Materials and Device Spectroscopy Group in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB), addresses a long-standing challenge in perovskite LEDs. A key limitation in conventional perovskite thin films is inhomogeneous broadening, which is driven by variations in composition and crystal size across the film. This broadens the emission spectrum and reduces colour purity.
“Looking ahead, this research could help advance next-generation display technologies with more vivid colours and lower power consumption. It may also support the development of compact, low-cost and solution-processed light sources for optical communication, biological imaging and integrated photonic technologies,” Jian, now an Assistant Professor at Fudan University in China, said.
The team introduced an interface-regulated crystallisation approach to better control how the material forms during processing.
The method uses an underlying layer with minimal molecular interactions with perovskite precursors, with poly(9-vinylcarbazole) used as an example. This enables smoother ion diffusion during growth, and when combined with dimethylformamide vapour, promotes more controlled crystallisation.
The authors – including many colleagues from Professor Stranks’ research group – report that this leads to films with both horizontal and vertical homogeneity and reduced inhomogeneous broadening, approaching that of perovskite single crystals. This is reflected in ultranarrow photoluminescence linewidths of 13.6 nm, 13.7 nm, 13.8 nm and 14.4 nm across emission wavelengths from 464 nm to 522 nm.
When used in devices, the approach enables sky-blue perovskite LEDs with electroluminescence linewidths of 14.7 nm and a peak external quantum efficiency of 24.6%, with comparable performance across the blue-to-green emission range.

Question 4

2026 CEB Robot Club tournament boots up on 12 May

Accepted Answer

2026 Robot Club Tournament date announced
CEB Robot Club has officially confirmed the date for its 2026 tournament. Bots built by staff and students from all levels and sections of the department will pit their bots against each other on Tuesday 12 May.
Founded in 2024, CEB Robot Club sees teams of department members design and build robots, introducing engineering concepts through practical problem-solving and friendly competition rather than formal teaching. Members of the club get hands on with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools, electrical engineering, materials science and much more. Their efforts culminate in the annual CEB Robot Club tournament, which sees each team’s bot attempt to crash, smash and otherwise destroy their rivals in friendly competition.
This year’s tournament will again take place within an arena of steel, aluminium and polycarbonate built from the ground up by the CEB Makerspace team. This year’s arena will see a number of upgrades aimed at making the battle space safer, easier to assemble and crucially, smaller. The decrease in size will hopefully see an increase in the amount of bot-based mayhem and minimise lulls in the action.
The exact number of bots entering this year’s tournament has yet to be confirmed, but competition is expected to be fierce once again. Eyes turn to defending champion Muriel de Paula to see if he can make it back-to-back titles. At the time of writing, he hadn’t confirmed his plans for the tournament, so watch this space.
Heading into its third edition, the CEB Robot Club tournament has become a firm department favourite and has attracted attention from further afield. Earlier this year, it was announced that Robot Club has secured funding to expand to other departments across the University of Cambridge through the Enhancing Research Culture Fund. The future of CEB Robot Club looks bright.
Join us for the third annual CEB Robot Club tournament on Tuesday, 12 May 2026.

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