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Julia Linke, Adriana Bernardes, Gowan Whalley and Lucy Todd, have recently joined the NICE group in the UCL Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering (CNIE), all related to the application of nature-inspired solutions for sustainable development, in energy, manufacturing and health.

Julia has started work on making personalised adoptive T-cell therapies (ACT) for cancer treatment more affordable, via application of nature-inspired solutions and achieving process intensification. She is co-advised by Prof Marc-Olivier Coppens, Prof Richard Day and Dr Matthew Chin.

Adriana will focus on scrutinising the mechanisms behind nature’s molecular and ionic separation processes, which are rapid, selective and robust, such as the kidney’s blood filtration, the cell membrane’s selective permeation, and xylem’s water and nutrients transport. These need to be translated to macroscopic scales for applications to nature-inspired membrane technologies. This extends the work of Halan Mohamed in the CNIE.

Gowan completed his master’s degree in chemistry at Durham University in 2015-2019, specialising in Computational Chemistry and Materials Science and undertaking his master’s thesis at the Free University of Berlin. Gowan’s research with Dr Yang Lan will focus on the design of nature-inspired photocatalysts for CO2 reduction through a mixture of molecular modelling and data science techniques. They will collaborate with Prof Marc-Olivier Coppens and Prof Anna Mavrogianni at the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment.

Lucy’s research will involve the use of complex systems and graph theory to uncover rules in ecosystems underpinning resilience and adaptability and inform solutions for sustainable development. Lucy is currently working with Marc-Olivier and Matthew.

Lucy’s and Adriana’s research are made possible thanks to a very generous philanthropic donation – the A&B K Studentships. Julia and Gowan are part of a first cohort of EPSRC DTP Interdisciplinary students, promoting collaboration between UCL Engineering and different Faculties at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË.

Both studentships were awarded after a very competitive selection – congratulations and welcome to our newest PhD students!