Research Fellow (109212-0524)

About the Role

For informal enquiries, please contact Dr Sebastian Pike at Sebastian.Pike@warwick.ac.uk. 

Applications are invited for a Research Fellow to work on a Royal Society funded Project under the supervision of Dr. Sebastian Pike at the University of Warwick. The Research will involve the synthesis and characterisation of nanoscale, photoactive, molecularly defined metal-oxo clusters built from earth-abundant metals.

Metal oxides, such as TiO2 and CeO2, are important earth-abundant photoactive materials used widely as photocatalysts and self-cleaning surfaces. Utilising abundant elements and the energy from sunlight to drive useful chemical processes or to produce fuels is a crucial challenge for a sustainable society. This project will study metal-oxo clusters, which are molecular analogues of oxide materials, occurring at the 1-2 nm size scale. These clusters have similar photoactivity to bulk metal oxides, but, crucially, are atomically precise and highly tuneable. This allows for detailed study of photoreaction mechanism and modification of properties. Photoactivation of a metal-oxo cluster leads to a redox-active state containing (reducing) metal-based electrons and (oxidising) oxygen-based holes and, usefully, a cluster is able to store multiple electrons in a small, defined space, allowing onward multielectron processes to occur. This project will explore new cluster designs, including developing new structures that can sequentially absorb two visible photons. The researcher will establish the energy positions of photoexcited (proton-coupled) charge carriers and explore the precise mechanism of photoexcitation and charge transfer required for small molecule activation and catalysis.

The researcher will work within the Pike group in the Chemistry Department of the University of Warwick based in the interdisciplinary Materials and Analytical Science building. The research group have dedicated lab space well-furnished with fume hoods, Schlenk line and glovebox equipment for synthesis. Alongside the excellent departmental facilities (including NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry) the group have regular access to state-of-the-art X-ray and electron diffraction, and (ultrafast) spectroscopy equipment through the X-ray diffraction and Spectroscopy Research Technology Platforms and the Warwick Centre for Ultrafast Spectroscopy. Furthermore, the Group have regular access to specialised diffraction and spectroscopy experiments at Diamond Light Source.

The Pike group is focused primarily on the synthesis and study of metal-oxo cluster molecules and their use in photocatalysis or as precursors to functional materials. Please visit https://warwick.ac.uk/pikegroup to find out more.

Full details of the duties and selection criteria for this role can be found in the vacancy advert on the University of Warwick's jobs pages. You will be routed to this when you click on the Apply button.

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