Image: Paul Burn, Alex Loch

Image: 11th Annual SCMB Research Students Symposium: Qianqian Lin and Sarah McGregor

Image: School of Mathematics and Physics Research Higher Degree Student Poster Day 2013 | Ardalan Armin: 1st place

Professor Paul Burn and colleagues have led use of neutron reflectometry to study film morphology, interfaces, and diffusion in organic optoelectronic materials.

COPE is delighted to announce that Professor Paul Burn FRSC and Australian Research Council Federation Fellow has been elected to a Fellowship at the Australian Academy of Science.

For more information on this please click here and this link here.

COPE is delighted to announce that Dr Ebinazar Namdas has won a prestigious Future Fellowship from the Australian Government.

Dr Namdas has been awarded a four-year Future Fellowship to conduct research into organic-inorganic hybrid electronic devices and logic circuits.  The project will create the next generation of opto-electronic devices and logic circuits using solution-based organic-inorganic hybrid materials that have the potential of being extremely cheap, recyclable, and mechanically flexible.

COPE PhD student Justin Yu has successfully won both the SCMB qualifier round and the Faculty of Science semi-final to compete at the UQ 3 Minute Thesis competition Final.

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is a research communication competition developed by The University of Queensland. Participating students have three minutes to present a compelling oration on their thesis topic and its significance.

Researchers at COPE have recently been featured on the cover of Advanced Functional Materials.  Stable film morphology is critical for durable, high-performance organic light-emitting diodes. Uniformly blended films of Ir(ppy)3 in CBP formed by evaporation were found to phase-separate with moderate heating. Luminescence microscopy shows that phase separation leads to fiber-like structures of CBP (blue) and Ir(ppy)3 (green).

The Centre is currently advertising several new postdoctoral research positions as it continues to expand.  Positions are available in organic field effect transistors fabrication and testing,  organic optoelectronic materials synthesis, the physical deposition of transpare

Australia's leading research chemists have thrown themselves in the mix when it comes to celebrating the 2011 International Year of Chemistry.

UQ's chemistry researchers, whose work consistently ranked as above world standard in more fields than any other Australian university in the recent Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) ratings, are enthusiastically taking up the call to increase the profile of the chemistry discipline as part of the international celebrations.

 Materials Today have highlighted an important breakthrough made by COPE members Andrew Stephenson, Kwan Lee, Paul Meredith and Ben Powell in collaboration with Adam Micolich and the University of New South Wales.

Ben Powell, Seth Olsen and Paul Burn have just been awarded 600,000 hours of cpu time from the National Computer Infrastructure via the Merit Allocation Scheme. This resource will be vital for our continuing computational research effort.

Two COPE postgraduate students, Hamish Cavaye and Ross Jansen-van Vuuren, recently won prizes at the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences Postgraduate Research Students Symposium held in November 2010.  Congratulations to both Hamish and Ross on their excellent presentations.

Image:  Hamish Cavaye (left) and Ross Jansen-van Vuuren with their prize certificates

Two COPE members, Dr Hellen Hui  Jin and Dr George Vamvounis were recently successful in obtaining Early Career Researcher grants funded by The University of Queensland.

Dr Jin's research is aimed at improving the efficiency of plastic solar cells by device design and Dr Vamvounis will focus on exploring the development of new molecules for memory devices.

Everyone at COPE would like to congratulate Seth Olsen on being awarded an Australian Research Fellowship (ARF).  This prestigious five-year fellowship had a success rate of just 13%, so Seth had to beat off some stiff competition.  We at COPE are pleased that this fellowship will keep Seth at COPE for the next five years.

 
Image: Karsten Krueger holding a solar cell component.  Photo: Stewart Gould

The COPE team congratulate Mr Dr Andrew Stephenson on being awarded his postdoctoral degree.  The title of his thesis is "Electrical Properties, Tunability and Applications of Superconducting Metal-Mixed Polymers."  Well done Andrew and we wish you all the best with your future career.

Ben Langley, a COPE student who is nearing the completion of his postdoctoral degree, recently won a prize for his poster entitled "Enhancing the properties of dendritic Ru(II) complexes for Dye Sensitised Solar Cells" at the CIMOPV Workshop.

Dr Yuan Fang joined the growing COPE team in April 2010 as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow.  He hails from Hubei in China, and obtained his doctoral degree from Sun Yat-sen University in December 2009 majoring in Materials Physics and Chemistry. 

An interdisciplinary team of chemists and physicists from UQ and Harvard, including COPE’s Ben Powell, have performed the world’s first quantum chemistry calculation on a quantum computer. Their results were published this week in Nature Chemistry. This result has already been reported by a wide range of news sources including New Scientist and Yahoo News.

Ben Powell, Seth Olsen, Paul Burn and Ross McKenzie have been awarded half a million CPU hours (with an in-kind value of $250,000) as part of a "superproject" on the National Computational Infrastructure's (NCI) National Facility under the merit allocation scheme. This grant will enable a wide range of computational work at COPE supporting experimental and theoretical work across the whole range of the centre's interests.

Two PhD students from COPE, Hamish Cavaye and Benjamin Langley, received awards for their work at the recent SCMB Research Students Symposium.

                                             
                                     Hamish Cavaye with his poster at the Research Students Symposium

The success of three important funding proposals by COPE researchers was announced recently by the ARC.  Dr George Vamvounis, a COPE postdoctoral research fellow, was awarded a prestigious Australian Research Fellowship for five years. Prof Ross McKenzie obtained funding from the ARC to conduct research for optimising information storage. Dr Ben Powell and Dr Lawrence (Shih-Chun) Lo won an ARC discovery grant which will enable them to conduct research into the way electrons behave in new materials.

George Vamvounis

COPE researchers have received almost $2 million from the Queensland Government to lead an international alliance working on the next generation of solar cells.

Andrew Fraser MP (State Treasurer) announces the National and International Research Alliance Program

funding for solar cell research
 

The researchers, Professor Paul Burn and Associate Professor Paul Meredith from the Centre for Organic Photonics & Electronics, focus on solar cells that have the potential for wide commercial deployment – they're plastic, portable and low-cost.

“Solar cells are widely viewed as an important pillar of the future renewable energy technology mix,” Professor Burn said.

“The objective of this research alliance is to develop innovative technologies for the next generation of solar cells, which will be based on inexpensive and environmentally friendly plastic materials.”

Associate Professor Meredith said presently the best commercially available solar cells were based on silicon and had efficiencies of about 10-20 percent.

“As a result of the cost and complexity of processing silicon, it takes five to 10 years electricity generation to pay off the initial outlay; a fact that hinders universal up-take, especially for households, in the current economic framework,” he said. 

To read more please click here:

In a series of four articles by academic researchers in the Centre, COPE was highlighted in the June 2009 issue of the monthly magazine published by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, Chemistry in Australia.

Three physicists from COPE and SMP have reported the discovered a new ratio that takes the same predicted value in a wide range of strongly correlated materials.

 National review recommends a major overhaul of Australia's system of research innovation.

The opening of the Centre was showcased in the 14 November 2008 issue of Photonics World.

Read more about it here.