Being a student at UCL is about so much more than just acquiring knowledge. Studying here gives you the opportunity to realise your potential as an individual, and the skills and tools to thrive.
Find out more about what makes UCL research world-leading, how to access UCL expertise, and teams in the Office of the Vice-Provost (Research, Innovation and Global Engagement).
Discover the many ways you can connect with UCL, and how we work with industry, government and not-for-profit organisations to tackle tough challenges.
Founded in 1826 in the heart of London, UCL is London's leading multidisciplinary university, with more than 16,000 staff and 50,000 students from 150 different countries.
To unravel the mysteries of magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles formation, researchers at UCL including Maximilian Besenhard, Nguyen Thanh and Asterios Gavriilidis teamed up with groups at Universidade de Lisboa, as well as Graz University of Technology and the Elettra Sincrotrone Triest, which are part of the Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium (CERIC). By uniting forces, between the MAFuMa project at UCL and the Nano-analytics for Pharmaceutics project at CERIC (PI Aden Hodzic) it was possible to combine a flow chemistry approach using steady-state operation to locally “freeze” transient reaction states with CERICs multi-technique approach combining in-situ synchrotron XRD and SAXS. This combined effort provided for the very first time precious information for the early stages of IONPs synthesis, which has been used to demonstrate a robust continuous flow nanoparticle synthesis process. For more info see Besenhard et al. (Chem. Eng. J., 2020, 125740).
Prof Gavriilidis’ group has developed a continuous flow process for gold nanoclusters synthesis, which forms one of the key ingredients of a new coating that activates with ambient light to kill bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. The research has been performed with EPSRC funding through the MaFuma EPSRC project, and has been published in Nature Communications. Read more about the article on UCL news.
Prof Asterios Gavriilidis delivers seminars on "Metal Nanoparticle Synthesis in Millifluidic Systems” at the CSIR, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune and IIT, Mumbai, India, in January 2020.
Dr Jaspreet Kaur Randhawa, Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi (IIT Mandi) presents her research on "Magneto-fluorescent core-shell SPIONs as a theranostic platform" on 16th of January 2020 at UCL, as part of the MAFuMa project seminar series.
The Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture 2019 is awarded to Professor Nguyễn Thị Kim Thanh for her achievements in the field of nanomaterials. Professor Thanh is awarded a medal and a gift of £1,000 at her lecture in October 2019. The Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture is made to an individual for an outstanding contribution to any area of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and to support the promotion of women in STEM. The award is supported by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and is named in honour of the biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA.
An IAA EPSRC 'Discovery-to-Use' grant has been awarded to Prof Asterios Gavriilidis, Prof Peter Dobson and Spyridon Damilos for the translation of the 'Dial-a-nanoparticle' research – concerning the targeted continuous manufacturing of gold nanoparticles (developed within the MAFuMa scheme) – towards commercialisation.
