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Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
A living bionic leaf to produce solar fuels and chemicals from carbon dioxide (RENU22C/HLS/APP/KALATHIL)
Overview
The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Renewable Energy Northeast Universities (ReNU)is a collaborative doctoral training programme run by the Universities of Northumbria, Newcastle and Durham. In addition to undertaking an individual scientific research project at one of the three partner Universities, doctoral candidates will engage with added value training opportunities, for example in business, innovation and internationalisation through a 4-year training programme that has been designed to maximise the benefits of a cohort approach to doctoral training. The start date is 1st October 2022.
Sunlight is an abundant source of clean and economical energy. One-hour of sunlight can satisfy a year’s energy demand across the entire world. Inspired from natural photosynthesis, the proposed project develops a bionic leaf that provides a hybrid approach to the conversion of solar energy into fuels and chemicals by integrating microbes with synthetic light harvesters. In such hybrid systems, microbes perform thermodynamically and kinetically challenging chemical reactions with high rates and selectivity, whereas light harvesters act as substrates for microbes or functional components to carry out light absorption, charge transfer and product separation. The project also investigates the microbial life on the photoexcited light harvesters by employing gene expression analysis, live/dead assay and BioRad protein assay. Finally, the project elucidates the fundamental electron transfer mechanism from light harvesters to microbes using advanced spectroscopic techniques.
The following key skills will be gained during this project,
1. Microbiology: Culturing of anaerobic microbes, protein extraction, genome analysis
2. Material synthesis: Semiconductors, quantum dots
3. Analytical skills: Transient absorption spectroscopy, NMR, HPLC
4. Characterization: TEM, SEM, XRD, XPS
The project is jointly supervised by Northumbria university, Newcastle university and Johnson Matthey. The PhD student will be part of the world’s first Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE). This is an £8M initiative between Northumbria and Newcastle Universities funded by Research England. The project will benefit from access to world-class facilities associated with the HBBE. These include: (i) dedicated large new research labs / workshops (ii) a dedicated fermentation facility; (iii) a state-of-the-art Multi-Omics Lab capable of advanced analyses via cutting-edge DNA sequencers, including a PacBio Sequel, an Illumina Nextseq 550 System, an Oxford NanoPore GridION, and mass spectrometers. Newcastle university provides advanced spectroscopic facilities such as transient spectroscopy and microscopy.
This project is supervised by Dr Shafeer Kalathil. For informal queries, please contact shafeer.kalathil@northumbria.ac.uk
The application closing date is 6 February 2022. Please note that interviews, should they be arranged, will be online rather than in person due to COVID-19.
Closing Date: 6 February 2022
Funding notes: Home and International students (inc. EU) are welcome to apply. The studentship is available to Home and International (including EU) students and includes a full stipend at UKRI rates (for 2021/22 full-time study this is £15,609 per year) and full tuition fees. Also significant additional funding to cover research costs and local, national and international travel (conferences and exchanges).
Start Date and duration: 1 October 2022 for 4 years
Full Description: For more information please click here.
For informal enquiries, please contact shafeer.kalathil@northumbria.ac.uk