News

Our 3rd paper accepted at the start of the year comes from Beth Trinh's PhD work. We show in Biomacromolecules a method of detecting the presence of amplified DNA from a range of pathogens associated with serious infections including Gram-negative bacteria, Gram-positive bacteria, and viruses.

Recent work collaborating with the Armes group on tetrablock copolymer nanoparticles as waterborne thermoplastic elastomers has been publised in Chemistry of Materials.

The 1st paper of the year on Polymer-assisted 3D printing of inductor cores comes from Zhidong Luo's PhD project and shows how polymers can be used to help develop low-cost, fully aqueous, high loading, and 3D printable ceramic inks for functional devices.

Our paper on the preparation of 3D printable, thermo-responsive, self-healing nanocomposite hydrogels formed from worm-like micelles and graphene oxide has been published in Soft Matter. 

Several of the group presented their work at international conferences over the summer including the 12th International Colloids Conference in Palma (Spain) and UK Colloids 2023 in Liverpool (U.K.), where Haoyang Pan won a poster prize.

Front cover of Journal of Materials Chemistry B for article 'Visible label-free detection of bacterial DNA using flocculation of sterically stabilised cationic latexes.' 

Our paper on the preparation of polymer nanoparticle-based complex coacervate hydrogels using polymerisation-induced self-assembly derived nanogels has been published in Soft Matter. This article has been included in the journal's Emerging Investigators Series.

In our last group meeting before the winter break we exchanged gifts and went for some coffee & cake. Highlights from the year include congratulating our graduating PhD students (Sergio and Shang-Pin), welcoming new ones (Laila and Marcell), finishing our laboratory moves, attending some excellent conferences and some success in our publishing endevours.

Several of the group attended the McBain Medal 2022 meeting on Stimuli-Responsive Soft Matter and Interfaces in London. Lee was one of the organisers of this meeting and our group was well represented in the poster session. 

We are (finally) moving into our new laboratories within Engineering Building A. This is a brand new building specially constructed to be the home of Engineering and Materials at The University of Manchester. Part of the group will be based in these facilities, in addition to our labs in the Henry Royce Institute.

Several of the group attended the Rideal Lecture and Symposium on Polymer Colloids in London. Lee was one of the organisers of this meeting and our group was well represented in the poster session. They also had the opportunity to see the sights in London!

In a collaborative paper, polypyrrole-coated olivine particles were shot into a gas target. The particles differentially ablated their organic coatings in the form of large molecules. The results suggest that meteors may deliver complex organics into planetary atmospheres.

Our recent Soft Matter article investigating the preparation and characterisation of graphene oxide containing block copolymer worm gels is now available as an Advance Article.

Beth from our group enjoys taking part in outreach activities and delivered the first BrilliantClub tutorial to Halifax Academy. The Year 9 scientists enjoyed their session of university style learning and were excited to get stuck into their assignments all about bacteria.

Elizabeth Trinh from our group, won the poster prize at the 16th RSC Biomaterials Chemistry Special Interest Group Annual Meeting in January 2022.

Our recent Soft Matter article investigating the effect of pH on the synthesis of pyridine-functional diblock copolymer nanoparticles is now available as an Advance Article.

In our last group meeting before Christmas we had a small celebration with gifts and treats. The group pulled together amazingly in this challenging semester and showed their togetherness with some very thoughtful secret Santa presents.

An article on the preparation of tuneable injectable nanocomposite hydrogels has been published in Polymer. This work was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Sheffield Hallam University.

The photo above is from the 1st time the group has all been in the same place since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Our PhD students have worked tirelessly to overcome the difficulties placed in their way over the last 14 months and we strive to continue to our research as effectively we can in the months to come.

Our recent Polymer Chemistry article on RAFT miniemulsion polymerisation of benzyl methacrylate using non-ionic surfactant. Is now available to openly access online.

Our article  on the formation of sulfate-functional nanoparticles prepared by polymerisation-induced self-assembly (PISA) has been included a special issue of Polymer Chemistry on Polymerization-Induced Self-Assembly (PISA)  (2021 Issue 1). Available here: https://rsc.li/py-pisa

Beth was one of the 10 candidates shortlisted for the 2020 MRC Max Perutz Science Writing Award for her article ‘A New ‘Gold Standard’ in Infection Diagnosis.’  You can find her article by following the link on the 2020 announcement page.

The summer of 2020 imposed numerous challenges in the scientific world due to the coronavirus pandemic. All scientific meetings were moved online and we were directly involved in organising events such as: ECCo Live 2020, the first RAPS virtual seminar, and UK Colloids 2020 Online Flash Presentations.

3 PhD's in a Pod is a fun, informative science podcast produced by Jack from our group and was released throughout May/June 2020. In each podcast @PhDJack94 and co-host Josh invited a different PhD student or Post Doctoral Researcher to talk about their life. Their podcasts can be found on Spotify, Apple Music and Podbean, with links available in their twitter profile (here).

Beth has been involved teaching plant science for science week at the Whitworth art gallery with PhD students from the Advanced Biomedical Materials CDT. 

Beth has won the Manchester Metallurgical Society heat of the IOM3 YPLC. Good luck in the next stages of the competition!

Work by Shang-Pin Wen has recently been published in Polymer Chemistry. Here we show the that the solvent quality has a dramatic impact on the formation of sulfate-functional nanoparticles prepared by polymerisation-induced self-assembly (PISA). This article has been included in a themed collection on PISA which can be viewed on the Polymer Chemistry website.

Jack was the runner up in the Sustainability Zone of the I'm a Scientist competition. He spent two weeks on live web-chats answering the questions of primary school children to enthuse them about a career as a scientist and to show them that scientists are ordinary people! 

Jack had the opportunity to spend two weeks on-site at AkzoNobel in Sassenheim, NL working to further his PhD research.

A big welcome to Haoyang Pan, Mohammed Jamali and Elisabeth Trinh who have all started a PhD in our group. You can see what their profiles and projects that they are working on here. Congratulations also goes to Qi Yue, who will be transferring from an MPhil to PhD.

Lee helped organise the 20th annual RAPS meeting (RAPS 2019) at The University of Leeds on the 4th - 6th September 2019 and the 2nd Early Career Colloid (ECCo) meeting at Loughborough University.

Our paper reporting the rational design of anionic diblock copolymer nanoparticles and worm gels has been published in Polymer Chemistry. These materials serve as useful model systems for calcite occlusion studies, carried out in collaboration with the Lara Estroff research group at Cornell University.

Work conducted in collaboration with the Saunders group has been published in Chemical Science. These new gels have excellent potential for applications as engineering gels and structural biomaterials, as well as for wound healing and water purification.

Lee recently presented at ArmesFest600. This meeting was organised to celebrate the publication of his former supervisors' 600th paper. 

Jack and Shang-Pin recently presented their work at the 14th International conference on materials chemistry (MC14) in Birmingham. 

Chi-Him Lo and recently presented his work on the role of additives on the anticorrosive properties of waterborne acrylic coatings at the the 15th Coatings Science International meeting in the Netherlands.

It was a pleasure to organise and have the majority of the group attend the 2019 Rideal meeting  for the Joint Colloids Group. The Rideal Lecture awardee was Professor Peter Lovell from the University of Manchester. This one-day symposium featured lectures by his colleagues and collaborators to talk on both their more recent research related to polymer colloids and the newest challenges in the field.  

Jack recently competed in the IOM3 Young Person’s Lecture Competition (YPLC) Regional North West Heat, winning first place for his talk entitled ‘Watching Paint Dry: How to Stop Corrosion’.  As well as the £150 prize, Jack now has the chance to compete in the YPLC National Final at The Armourers’ Hall in London on Wednesday 1st May. We wish him the best of luck and hope he does well! 

Our latest paper investigating how block copolymer stabilised gold nanoparticles interact with Zinc Oxide has just been accepted into Angewandte. 

Lee attended a very interesting one day meeting, the McBain Medal 2018 - Making and breaking colloidal assemblies: using chemical, physical, and mechanical stimuli to control soft matter. This was organised by the Joint Colloids Group  and the award winner was Dr Valeria Garbin of Imperial College London.

A collaborative paper in Macromolecules on the  'critical dependence of molecular weight on thermoresponsive behavior of diblock copolymer worm gels in aqueous solution' is now available.

It was a pleasure to organise the inaugural ECColloid meeting in Sheffield on 17-18th September. This 2-day meeting was held with the aim to join newly appointed academics and industrialists, research fellows and postdocs.

The 19th Annual RAPS Meeting (RAPS 2018) was held at the University of Bradford from 5-7th September 2018, and organised by Dr Maria Katsikogianni. Plenary speakers included Prof. Rachel O'Reilly (University of Birmingham), Prof. Giuseppe Mantovani (University of Nottingham, and Prof. Ben Whiteside (University of Bradford). 

Jack and Shang-Pin attended the Macro Group YRM 2018, held in Dublin, with Jack giving a presentation on his PhD work on the synthesis of functional polymer latexes for protective coatings.

Our latest paper investigating how block copolymer nanoparticles interact with calcite crystals has just been publised in JACS (doi:10.1021/jacs.8b03828). This work uses in Situ Atomic Force Microscopy to look at the surface of growing crystals in the presence of specially designed block copolymer particles prepared via polymerisation-induced self-assembly.

Sergio Oliveira Formoso joined us in April from the CDT in Regenerative Medicine as a PhD student. His project is based around hydrogels for stimulating nerve regeneration. Four polymer materials science and engineering MSc students have also joined the group to work on projects over the summer.

Kate and Lee attended the Commercialisation of Pickering Emulsions meeting at the RSC in London. Here Kate is presenting her poster on the long term stability of alkane-in-water Pickering nanoemulsions.

Jack has been telling the School of Materials blog about his PhD studying the effect of polymers on the corrosion resistance of emulsion paints. Find out what’s got him excited about this area of research!

Shang-Pin started his PhD program with us in September 2017. His aim is to use polymerisation-induced self-assembly (PISA) to design and prepare a wide range of diblock copolymer nanoparticles.

Had a busy September in the Fielding Lab! Lee attended RAPS2017 at the University of East Anglia, followed by Polymers for Advanced Technologies 2017 at the University of Manchester. Chi, Jack and Lee also visited one of our sponsors, AkzoNobel, in the Netherlands.

A warm welcome to Kate, she joins us as a postdoctoral researcher working with our group and Dr Bianca Price. She'll be looking into the use of colloidal particles for for medical diagnostic applications.

New Macromolecules paper "Time-Resolved SAXS Studies of the Kinetics of Thermally Triggered Release of Encapsulated Silica Nanoparticles from Block Copolymer Vesicles" available online.

Amir Milani from the Saunders group has produced some great artwork which was chosen to be the front cover of Chemistry of Materials. This paper was based on the assembly of anisotropic pH-responsive hydrogels.

We have four PMSE MSc students in the lab this summer. Welcome all!

A big welcome to several new starters in the Fielding group. We have Jack Saunders starting his PhD and three Materials undergraduate students carrying out a project. Here we are looking ready to get to work after a lab clean.

Attended Recent Appointees in Polymer Science 2016 meeting at Loughborough University presenting recent work on the determination of the effective particle density of sterically-stabilised diblock copolymer nanoparticles.

JACS article 'Occlusion of Sulfate-Based Diblock Copolymer Nanoparticles within Calcite: Effect of Varying the Surface Density of Anionic Stabilizer Chains' by Yin Ning et al. is now online (ASAP).

Attended 'Warwick Polymer Conference 2016' presenting work on  the preparation of polyacid-functionalised diblock copolymer nano-objects via polymerisation-induced self-assembly.

Article 'RAFT aqueous dispersion polymerization of N-2-(methacryloyloxy)ethyl pyrrolidone: aconvenient low-viscosity route to high molecular weight water-soluble copolymers' by Cunningham et al., accepted into Macromolecules.

Edge Article 'In situ small-angle X-ray scattering studies of sterically-stabilized diblock copolymer nanoparticles formed during polymerization-induced self-assembly in non-polar media' accepted into Chemical Science.

Letter 'Incorporating Diblock Copolymer Nanoparticles into Calcite Crystals: Do Anionic Carboxylate Groups Alone Ensure Efficient Occlusion?' available to read on ACS Macro Letters website.

Evening seminar given to Sheffield Colloid Network about my academic career path from PhD to recently appointed lecturer.

Review article 'Space science applications for conducting polymer particles: Synthetic mimics for cosmic dust and micrometeorites' to be featured on the front cover of Chemical Communications.

Review article 'Polymerization-induced self-assembly of block copolymer nanoparticles via RAFT non-aqueous dispersion polymerization' accepted into Progress in Polymer Science.

Review article 'Space science applications for conducting polymer particles: Synthetic mimics for cosmic dust and micrometeorites' accepted into Chemical Communications.

Article 'Is carbon black a suitable model colloidal substrate for diesel soot?' by Growney et al., accepted into Langmuir.