News
27/11-01/12/2023
With a successful grant award of £10 000 from the RSC, the organisation team of Jani Shibuya , Dylan Tawse , and Angel Cuesta put on a chemistry outreach event aimed at S3 students from around Aberdeen City and Shire. PhD student Jani lead the efforts in coordinating and presenting the workshops where the fundamental electrochemistry behind electrical conversion and storage was explored by the visitors as they got to go do three unique hands-on experiments; 1) green hydrogen generation, 2) zinc-air battery, and 3) fuel cell utilisation. The outstanding event hosted nine schools and over 300 visitors from the next door academy to all the way from Aboyne. Also in attendance were industrial partners, the Director of Energy at the University, and STV.
Thank you to all the help from ACES PhD and staff members, the chemistry department, and most importantly, RSC, for all their support.
24/06/2023
We celebrated our annual summer barbecue, this year with a wonderful summer weather for once
16/06/2023
The Department of Chemistry celebrated our annual PhD Students Symposium. Jani Shibuya and Alan Gibson secured the prizes to the best flash poster presentation by 2nd-year PhD students and to the best poster by 1st-year PhD students.
17/04/2023 - Laura Perez Martinez successfully passed her PhD viva. Congratulatoions, Dr. Perez!
The Ab-Elektro Energy Science Seminar cycle started on 28 September. The second seminar will take place on 30 October. Anybody within the University of Aberdeen with an interest in any aspect of Energy Science is welcome to join us to listen to our speakers or to present the results themselves. The cycle will also feature speakers from outside our institution and we encourage colleagues from other groups, disciplines and schools to come forward themselves or suggest speakers.
September -October 2022 - The group keeps growing. On 17 October Dr. Haytham Hussein joined us to work on our EPSRC-funded project (see news from 31/03/2022). During the last two months we have also welcomed in the group visiting stedents from Brazil (Victor Yukuhiro), India (Nandita Mohandas) and Germany (Felix Rosenkranz).
04-06/09/2022 - The long awaited in-person conference Electrochem 2022 was a success with both Edwin Avella and Prof. Angel Cuesta presenting in the presenting boardrooms of Energy and Environemental, and Fundamental and Applied Electrochemistry respectively. Great work!
Edwin Avella discussing work from his thesis project - Water Splitting Driven by Combining a Z-Scheme wijth photocatalysis at the Interface Betwen Two Immiscible Electrolyte Solutions (ITIES)
Prof. Angel Cuesta presenting ex-member, Laura Perez's work on the Dehydrogenation of Methanol on Pt Electrodes as Revealed by Time-Resolved ATR-SEIRAS
01/09/2022 - AbElektro warmly welcomes to the team Pavithra Gunasekaran who will be completing her PhD along side Dr. Burley within our Leverhulme Trust-funded project studying Time-resolved dynamics of the electrode-electrolyte interface!
17/06/2022 - Alan Gibson has been a warded a Carnegie Trust PhD Studentship. He will be supervised by Prof. Angel Cuesta and will work on understanding the effect of electrolyte cations on the structure of the electrode-electrolyte interface and on electrocatalytic reactions. Congratulations Alan!
10/06/2022 - The Department celebrated the first in=person PhD Students Symposium since the beginning of the pandemic. Jani Shibuya was awarded the prize for the best poster. Well done, Jani!
Our Review in ChemPhysChem on the use of ATR-SEIRAS to study the electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide is not only one of the most cited of articles in this journal of similar age but one of the most downloaded.
CPHC-S-19-00625(2).pdfHighly cited certificate.pdf01/06/2022 - Dr. Andrew Burley has joined the group to work on our Leverhulme Trust-funded project Time-resolved dynamics of the electrode-electrolyte interface.
31/03/2022 - We have been awarded an "Adventurous Energy Research" grant by EPSRC in collaboration with Dr. Panagiotis Kechagiopoulos from the School of Engineering (https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/15896/).
See EPSRC's press release and media coverage in the links below.
01/11/2021 - Jani Shibuya has joined the group to start his PhD Thesis on acid-base redox-flow batteries.
21/04/2020 - Marco Papasizza successfully defended his PhD Thesis and passed his viva. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the viva had to be done remotely using Skype but this did not prevent Marco's good performance. Well done and congratulations, Dr. Papasizza!
27/01/2020 - Onagie "Faith" Ayemoba successfully defended her PhD thesis and passed her viva. Congratulations Faith, sorry, we mean Dr. Ayemoba!
24/08/2019 - Xiaohui Yang successfully defended and passed his PhD Viva. We also had an exciting talk by Xiaohui's examiner Professor Mathieu Salanne (CNRS Laboratoire, Paris France) on simulating systems consisting of ionic liquid electrolytes and carbon electrodes. Prof. Mathieu is a professor at Sorbonne University within PHENIX and has just won a ERC grant. All the best to Dr. Xaohui Yang!
16/07/2019 - We congratulate Jonathan Mwanda who successfully defended and passed his PhD Viva. All the best Dr. Jonathan Mwanda!
19/09/2018 - The Group Leader (Angel Cuesta) has been promoted to Personal Chair, effective from 1st August 2018.
14/06/2018 - Osiry, Yu, Heriberto and Ghulam have all already arrived to Aberdeen and are ready to start working on their projects
01/03/2018 - We have already selected all four Rutherford Fellows (see news from 07/02/2018). They will start arriving in May. The selected fellows are:
Osiry Hernández, CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico, from 1 May 2018 to 31 January 2019
Ghulam Hussein, Curtin University, Australia, from 15th may 2018 to 14th February 2019
Yu Liu, Curtin University, Australia, from 21st May 2018 to 20th February 2019
Heriberto Díaz, IMP, Mexico, from 4th June 2018 to 3 March 2019
February 2018 - New SEM facility in King's College, next to our STM/AFM lab. See the video at https://youtu.be/Q-PCEHsIe-0
07/02/2018 - We have been selected as recipients of one of the only 17 UUKi Rutherford Fund Strategic Partner Grants recently awarded (http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/International/Pages/recipients-of-2-25million-UUKi-rutherford-fund-strategic-partner-grants-announced.aspx).
The scheme is funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and will allow us to bring early career researchers from Mexico and Australia to Aberdeen to work on projects related with Energy Storage and Conversion from Renewables. We will host a total of 36 months x researcher between March 31st 2018 and March 30th 2019.
11/10/2017 - Jiabo Le has successfully went through his viva today. He will be the first Ab-Elektro PhD student to graduate. Congratulations from all the group! We also had the opportunity to listen to an excellent and inspiring seminar by Prof. Marc Koper from the University of Leiden (The Netherlands), who was Jiabo´s external examiner.
01/10/2017 - Laura Pérez Martínez, an Erasmus Trainee from the University of Zaragoza (Spain) has arrived to Aberdeen. She will be working with us for 8 months. Welcome to Aberdeen, Laura!
15/09/2017 - Beth Solomon has joined the group as undergraduate student to undertake her BSc research miniproject. She will be working in a subproject on the spectroscopic monitoring of galvanostatic potential oscillations during the electrocatalytic oxidation of small organic molecules: Fabian Hartl will help supervise her.
02/09/2017 - Fabian Hartl, a visiting PhD student from The University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) has just arrived and will be working with us for 6 months. He will be doing research on monitoring galvanostatic potential oscillations during the electocatalytic oxidation of some simple organic molecules using ATR-SEIRAS and UV-vis reflectance spectroscopy.
27/08/ to 01/09/2017 - Jiabo Le, Xiaohui Yang, Marco Papasizza and Group Leaders Angel Cuesta and Jun Cheng (the latter currently in Xiamen University) attended the 68th Annual Meeting of the ISE in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. All five of them delivered oral presentations of the group's research. On their way back to Aberdeen Xiaohui Yang, Marco Papasizza and Angel Cuesta had to make a long stop in Dublin. We took this as an opportunity to visit the city. Below, enjoying a pint of Guinness and some oysters with James Joyce (in effigy).
06/06/2017 - We have been able to fabricate and orientate our first Aberdonian Pt single crystal. We only need to find a way to cut and polish it to have our first Pt single-crystal electrode.
25/05/2017 - Caecilie Benckendorf has started working on her summer project, funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.
26/04/2017 - The Group's PhD students attended the Butler Symposium in Saint Andrew's. Onagie, Chris and Xiaohui delivered talks reporting their results. Marco, Chris and Jonathan presented posters with their results. Onagie Ayemoba was awarded the prize to the best talk in the symposium. Congratulations! This is the second year in a row that members of our group are awarded this prize, as Jiabo Le won it last year. Well done!
06/04/2017 - We have just known that Caecilie Benckendorf, a 4th Year undergraduate student, has been awarded a Summer Scholarship by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. She will work with us during 6 weeks on a small research project.
March 2017 - Andres returned to Chile. We hope he enjoyed his productive time here.
January 2017 - Laura Machado has joined the group as an undergraduate student. She will be working on a mini-research project until the end of March.
28/11/2016 - We welcome Andres Ramirez Ramirez from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago de Chile. He will be a visiting PhD student in our group during 4 months. We wish him much success with his experiments during this time.
20/10/2016 - Dr. Cuesta has been elected Chair-elect of Division 7 (Physical Electrochemistry) of the ISE. He will serve a total of 6 years as Chair-elect (2017-2018), Chair (2019-2020) and Past Chair (2021-2022).