The Team
Who We Are
Martyn McLachlan
Group Leader
Originally from Paisley in the West of Scotland Martyn completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Paisley (now University of the West of Scotland) before undertaking a PhD at the University of Glasgow. In 2004 the move to London happened, starting at Imperial College as a postdoc before being awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship (2007-2012). Martyn was appointed as a a Lecturer in 2013, and promoted to full-professor in 2020.
Teaching is a passion and Martyn currently contributes to several undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as overseeing a large piece of undergraduate coursework in Year 2. In the past Martyn has taught He taught core and elective module across all undergraduate years in addition to holding numerous roles that support teaching and learning including course director of the MSc in Advanced Materials Science and Engineering and coding the role of director of undergraduate studies. Currently Martyn supports students across the Faculty of Engineering in the role of deputy faculty senior tutor and serves as the director for the jointly funded EPSRC-SFI centre for doctoral training in the advanced characterisation of materials (www.cdt-acm.org).
Current research interests lie in the area of functional electronic materials, more specifically their deposition and processing in optoelectronic devices. At the heart of this lies a fundamental desire to derive an understanding of the interplay between composition, processing and performance in a range of device platforms and to better understand the role of the numerous interfaces that exist at a variety of length-scales in such devices.
+44(0) 207 594 9692
Baxter
Group mascot
Mr Baxter hails from South Wales and has been the official group mascot and unofficial group member since 2019. He became well known during lockdown and has unintentionally appeared on countless Teams/Zoom meetings and has even popped into the odd lecture and tutorial.
He spends his days reading about quantum mechanics, chewing bones and sleeping.
Esra Alhabshi
PhD candidate
Esra graduated from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. Her bachelor’s degree focused on Nanotechnology and Microsystems. She works in the research and development department of the Saudi oil company, Saudi Aramco. She has been working in the sustainability research team of Saudi Aramco, and she worked on Perovskite single crystal, triple cation high bandgap perovskites, and perovskite solar cells. She joined the group in October 2021.
William Rodriguez Kazeem
PhD candidate
William graduated from Kingston University with a BSc in Chemistry with Professional Placement (carried out at University of Valladolid, Spain) in 2021 and more recently from Imperial College London with an MRes in Green Chemistry, Energy and the Environment (2022). He is passionate about research and his BSc project was based around the progression of lead-free perovskites as photovoltaics while his MRes project involved the investigation of an aerosolised solvent in order to improve lead-free perovskite photovoltaics. His PhD involves the investigation of doping and defects in metal oxide semiconductors.
Edoardo Angela
PhD candidate
Edoardo graduated from Imperial College London with a MEng in Materials Science and Engineering. He is now part of the Nanotechnology and Nanoscale Characterisation group, working under the supervision of Prof. Martyn McLachlan and Dr. Nicola Gasparini. His research will focus on photodetectors; devices which see layers of different semiconducting materials sandwiched between two electrodes in order to detect light. Such devices can detect different ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum by changing the active layer semiconductor, making them suitable for a plethora of applications. In particular, Edoardo will be looking at perovskite photodetectors, and how each thin film layer can be optimized and engineered to deliver the best performances for the different applications
Zhaoyi Du
PhD candidate
Zhaoyi graduated from Northwestern Polytechnical University (Xi’an, China) joint with Queen Mary University of London (London, UK) with a bachelor’s degree in Polymer Materials in 2021. And then he got his master degree in MSc Advanced Materials Science and Engineering programme in Imperial College London. He joined the group since his master programme and now his PhD project is working on preparing perovskite solar cells with environmentally sustainable solvents.
2023-2024
Sami Kibal
MEng project student
Weitao Qian
MSc Advanced Materials Science
project student
Yutian Tang
MSc Advanced Materials Science
project student
Jiahan Rui
MRes Nanomaterials
project student
Lola Bourgeois
MEng project student
Yuheng Chen
MSc Advanced Materials Science
project student
Adam Chen
MRes Nanomaterials
project student
Yongqi Huang
MRes Nanomaterials
project student
Qiuyu Zhou
MRes Green Chemistry
project student