Every September, PE-CDT students gather at Imperial College to present their research to staff, students, external academics and PE-CDT alumni.

2019 Symposium

The PE-CDT Annual Symposium is a highlight of our students' year and this year was no different as we heard the excellent research from Cohort 8, stories from our alumni, talks by our distinguished external invited speakers and posters from all other cohorts.

During the morning sessions we heard from Prof Antoine Kahn, of Princeton University who joined us to talk about the electronic structure of metal halide perovsite 3D and 2D surfaces and welcomed back Dr Gwen Wyatt-Moon a Cohort 5 alumni now at the University of Cambridge. Gwen discussed her journey from engineering to physics and how she has returned to her natural "engineering" habitat.

After lunch and a superb poster session, there was a fascinating talk by Prof Lisa Hall of the University of Cambridge on proteins for affordable diagnostics in low resource countries and we concluded the day with another alumni - this time Dr Jameel Marafie, also from Cohort 5, who has started his own technology company: Headlight AI. Interspersed with these talks were late stage review talks from Cohort 8, and the standard this year was exceptional. We also squeezed in a flash poster presentation session featuring a selection of our poster presentations.

Antoine Kahn, of the University of Princeton, said:

"The whole day was extremely interesting. I was much impressed by the maturity of your graduate students and the quality of the talks and posters.  They showed top notch research and I was very pleased to participate."

The drinks and networking session at the end of the day featured prize giving for best talks and posters of the day. Winners:

• Audience Choice for Best Flash Poster Presentation: Helen Bristow
• Audience Choice for Best Poster: Shenyang Chen
• Runner up Best Poster: Ryley Ratnasingham
• Best Poster: Luis Lanzetta Lopez
• Runner up Best Talk: Panagiota Kafourou
• Best Talk: Sam Hillman

2018 Symposium

Prof Alison Walker of the University of Bath is a member of the CPE/PE-CDT External Advisory Board and presented an engaging talk on multiscale simulations of organic devices and perovskite solar cells.

Students who presented at the 2018 Symposium include:

• Thomas Hodsden "Towards New Electron-deficient Units for N-type Applications"
• Ryley Ratnasingham "AACVD for Methylammonium Lead Triiodide for Photovoltaic Applications"
• Jaspreet Kainth "Hybrid Thin Films Prepared by Solution Processing and ALD for Ambipolar Thin Film Transistor Devices"
• Saurav Limbu "Mechanism of Chemical Compounds Detection in Organic Sensors using Electrochemically Doped Semiconducting Polymers"
• Ross Warren "Tuning the Ambipolar Behaviour of OFETs via Band Engineering"
• Shenyang Chen "Programming and Ordering Nanospheres into Hierarchical Structures via Geometric Control"
• Julianna Panidi "N-type Organic Semiconductor Doping for Thin Film Transistors"
• Luis Lanzetta Lopez "Layered Hybrid Tin Halide Perovskites: Charge Recombination Dynamics, Stability Considerations and Novel Processing Methods"

We were also delighted to hear from two PE-CDT alumni: Dr George Richardson, who gave a talk entitled "Cheap, Flexible and Lightweight: Life after Plastic Electronics" and Dr Luca Occhi who gave a fascinating talk on life outside academia, sharing his experience and insights on starting a career in industry.

2017 Symposium

Two PE-CDT Alumni from Cohort 3 gave talks about their CDT experience and careers since graduating. Dr Abby Casey (Technologist at Infinium) talked about "My experience transitioning from academia to industry", while Dr Jorge Costa (Postdoc at CNRS) talked about "Getting away from Plastic Electronics (but never very far)".

Guest talks were presented by two external academics who have connections to the PE-CDT.  Professor David Lidzey (University of Sheffield, and member of the PE-CDT/CPE Advisory Board) talked about his experience of setting up a spin-out company.  Professor Henning Sirringhaus (University of Cambridge) discussed his research on charge transport physics of high mobility organic semiconductors.

• Best talk prize: Stefan Bachevillier (Materials Department, Imperial College)
• Runner-up talk prize: Adam Wright (Physics Department, Oxford University)
• Alumni Choice talk prize: Becky Kilmurray (Materials Department, Imperial College)
• Best poster prize: Madeleine Morris (Cohort 5; Chemistry Department, Imperial College)
• Runner-up poster prize: Nathan Cheetham (Cohort 5; Physics Department, Imperial College)