Chemistry Fellowships

Join our department where cutting-edge research meets an inspiring collaborative environment. Our dedicated staff and state-of-the-art research facilities provide the ideal environments for innovative exploration and discovery. We offer comprehensive support to our research fellows, including mentorship and access to a network of leading in-house experts. The department has a strong track record supporting excellent candidates for research fellowships from the UKRI, Royal Society, EPSRC, Royal Academy of Engineering, The Leverhulme Trust, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and other selected fellowships.

Evaluate your current suitability for an early-career fellowship by following these steps.

In addition, there is range of other, partly more senior fellowships. These are listed on a website of UCL RIS, and applications are centrally managed by UCL. 

Meet our Research Fellows

Dr Adam Clancy, Royal Society University Research Fellowship 

The dynamic arrangement of molecules at solid surfaces is important for a wide range of applications including batteries and paint. The molecular arrangement is well understood for large and flat surfaces, but fails at smaller length scales, as features approaches the size of the solvent molecules. In my Royal Society University Research Fellowship at UCL Chemistry, I am using nanomaterials in solution as an experimental playground to understand how solvents and ions behave at nanostructured surfaces to understand how shape changes behaviour. To do this, we use a range of techniques from liquid-TEM to neutron scattering to classic spectroscopies. With this information in hand, we can build models to predict new and exciting behaviours for energy storage, as well as better understand how to control and exploit unique nanomaterials.

Dr Michael Booth, Royal Society University Research Fellowship 

DNA and RNA form the basis for many therapeutic and experimental technologies, including gene editing and silencing, several aspects of nanotechnology, aptamers and their applications, and cell-free protein expression. It would be advantageous to control the function of these technologies, as this would greatly expand their application in biology and medicine by reducing toxic on/off-target effects and systemic toxicity. 

With support from my Royal Society University Research Fellowship, the main focus of our research is the generation of remote-controlled nucleic acids under the control of various stimuli, including temperature, magnetism, enzymes, chemical signals, and multiple wavelengths of light. These nucleic acids will be optimized to function with molecular machines, drug delivery, sensing, and siRNA and CRISPR technologies. In the future, this universal chemical method for controlling DNA and RNA structure and function may form the basis of controllable therapeutics and new technologies for basic research.

Dr Hugh Burton, Royal Society University Research Fellowship 

Shining light on molecules can promote electrons into excited states, providing energy to catalyse reactions or enable chemical reactions. Interactions between molecules and light are often too complicated to analyse with experiments alone, and thus theoretical chemistry is essential for understanding light-driven processes. However, modelling molecular excitations requires complex quantum mechanics that scales exponentially with the number of electrons, meaning that approximate models are essential. 

In my Royal Society University Research Fellowship at UCL Chemistry, I will develop new techniques to model interactions between molecules and light by combining a geometric perspective on excited electrons with emerging quantum algorithms. I will use the differential geometry of electronic structure to investigate the electron correlation in excited states, derive new excited-state approximations, and develop physical intuition into how future quantum computers systematically encode electronic states. These advances will lay the foundation for new computational techniques to predict molecular excitations, transforming our ability to understand phenomena such as light-driven reactions and photocatalysis.

Dr Emma Wolpert, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow

Organic electronic devices have promise in innovative applications such as wearable technologies, low-power displays, and smart packaging. These devices represent a vital step towards an energy-aware future as they offer more sustainable and energy-efficient alternatives to many current electronic devices. But despite their potential, the use of organic electronics is limited due to the challenge of designing devices whose structures result in favourable properties. While artificial intelligence has the potential to accelerate organic electronic design, a significant barrier is the lack of data. When experimental data is scarce it can be supplemented with computational data, but state-of-the-art calculations are often too computationally expensive to produce sufficient data. 

My research addresses this challenge by developing simple models which enable faster simulations with lower computational cost than traditional techniques. Specifically, I explore the interplay between molecular shape and interactions in solid-state structure formation. By combining these models with artificial intelligence, vast amounts of data are created and analysed quickly, enabling rapid screening of materials, and reducing the time needed to discover new organic electronic devices.

Dr Tim Hele, Royal Society University Research Fellowship

Smartphone batteries commonly go flat after a few hours’ screen time because the screens’ pixels, made of organic light-emitting diodes, are inefficient at converting electrical energy into light. Finding better organic emitters is challenging due the shortage of rational design rules which help pick the most efficient molecules within the large chemical space.

In my Royal Society University Research Fellowship, I design, predict, and explain highly efficient electronically active molecules based on fundamental theory and computational simulations. One key innovation has been combining electronic structure theory with intensity borrowing perturbation theory to predict how molecular alterations will alter the excited state energies and intensities. In addition, we have invented the fastest known algorithm to predict the excited states of radicals which is highly accurate and also spin pure. These breakthroughs will pave the way for the molecular design of highly efficient molecules for optoelectronic and quantum computing applications.

Dr James Attwater, Royal Society University Research Fellowship

Understanding the origins of biological life on Earth is of fundamental interest. The quest also has the potential to guide the search for life beyond Earth, and to inspire the development of artificial biomimetic systems. But how life was established and sustained by chemical processes remains a scientific mystery, considering that biology is a sophisticated out-of-equilibrium system. Tackling this question requires model molecular systems that harness chemistry for biological behaviour.

In my Royal Society University Research Fellowship at UCL Chemistry, I will explore how RNA – a central component of our biochemistry – can provide answers on the origin of life. I will utilize geochemistry, organic chemistry, and molecular evolution to find new ways for RNA to drive key life processes by engaging as a reagent, scaffold, or catalyst.  A focus is also to see how RNA evolution differs under the influence of new ‘prebiotic’ chemistries.

Dr Daniel Whitaker, Royal Society University Research Fellowship

I want to understand how life started on Earth. A key difference between living and inanimate matter is Darwinian evolution, the capacity to reproduce and survive preferentially in the presence of a selection pressure. Nucleic acids, the information storage polymers of life, are the simplest biological molecules inherently capable of Darwinian evolution, but evolution has not yet been demonstrated without the machinery of life. The monomers which make up nucleic acids are chiral – like left hands and right hands, they are not superimposable on their mirror images. Remarkably, nucleic acids are composed entirely of monomers with the same chirality – they are homochiral. How and why this should be is an unsolved mystery. My work focusses on testing the hypothesis that homochirality is a product of Darwinian evolution of nucleic acids. I investigate how chirally mixed nucleic acids can replicate without the machinery of life and combine this with simple selection pressures to build a chemical system capable of evolution towards homochirality. Ultimately, understanding how systems of nucleic acids become capable of Darwinian evolution will bring us to the cusp understanding the origin of life on Earth, and may even allow us to design synthetic life.

Dr Alex Chan, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellowship

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global health crisis which requires the urgent development of new antimicrobials that inhibit new molecular ‘Achilles heel’ targets of pathogenic microbes. However, no new antibiotic class has been discovered since 1987,  partly because searches have been restricted to small molecules that inhibit targets through non-covalent interactions.

In my Royal Commission 1851 Research Fellowship, I will develop new antimicrobials based on covalent cyclic peptides (CPs). Using CPs has several potential advantages including the more effective antimicrobial action enabled by the covalent target inhibition, and the identification of new targets in the biorelevant environment on live cells.  Additional multidisciplinary analysis will elucidate CP’s mechanism of action. The search for covalent CPs and novel targets contributes to global efforts to combat AMR.

Prof. Alethea Tabor, EPSRC Open Plus Fellowship

Antimicrobial resistance is a major threat to to global health. Bacteria are slow to develop resistance to cyclic antimicrobial peptides, as they target specific lipids only found in bacterial membranes. If we could understand how they work at the molecular level, they could be developed as powerful next-generation antibiotics.

In my EPSRC Open Plus Fellowship, we will develop new techniques to investigate how complex cyclic antimicrobial peptides selectively interact with their target lipids. Analogues of these peptides incorporating photocrosslinking chemical probes or specific NMR labels will enable us to take “snapshots” of the peptide-lipid interactions in the membrane. We will combine this with NMR and model membrane studies to build models of the peptide:lipid interactions in membrane environments and develop new antimicrobial drug leads active against multidrug-resistant bacteria. 

I will also work with young people in marginalised communities in London, co-creating visual art to communicate the threat of antimicrobial resistance to their communities in their own words.

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Fellowship Coordinator:
Professor Stefan Howorka
Email: s.howorka@ucl.ac.uk