Rothwell Prize Winner 

We are pleased to announce that Monika Jurcic (Supervisor: Prof. Ivan Parkin) won the Rothwell Prize for best poster presentation in the department 2016. Monika is pictured above with the organiser, Prof. Gopinathan Sankar.

Monika Jurcic obtained a First Class (hons) Master of Chemistry degree from the University of Bath in 2013, after which, she joined UCL as part of the Jill Dando institute's Security Science doctoral training centre, where she completed a Master of Research in 2014.

She is currently a second year PhD student hosted within the department of Chemistry where she is pursuing her research into the use of fluorescent metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for the trace detection of explosives.

The scope for this research arises from the increase in explosives attacks in recent years, thus there is a need for further developments into detection methods that successfully identify explosives or explosive related materials on a person, surface or vapour.

The aim of the project is to probe the use of metal-organic frameworks as sensing materials for the detection of trace quantities of explosive vapours and solutions containing explosives.

Metal-organic frameworks are a relatively novel class of porous and crystalline materials that have shown promise as sensing materials owing to their high porosity and surface area, tailorable surface/pore chemistries, easy and timely synthesis, high thermal stability, amongst others. This project envisages building a sensory array of a number of metal-organic frameworks, for the potential construction of a novel and portable explosives detection platform.