Research Fellow in Chemistry wins ERC Starting Grant

ERC Starting Grants are designed to support outstanding researchers at the early stage of their careers to become independent research leaders. These grants support researchers across a range of fields, with individual awards of up to €1.5 million available across a period of five years.

Dr Dan Congrave is among twelve researchers at the University of Oxford to be awarded an ERC Starting Grant. His research exploits original structural organic chemistry to design and synthesise new materials that are unprecedented in the way they absorb and emit light. The absorption and emission of light by organic molecules has broad ramifications across technologies, from cellular imaging in medicine, to the pixels in mobile phone displays.

The current state-of-the art organic materials, superluminophores, display intense absorption and fast emission, but achieve this through a requirement for aggregation, where multiple molecules must coherently assemble together. This self-assembly is extremely difficult to predict and control, which restricts applications and detailed understanding.

Through his ERC starting grant, Dr Congrave aims to pioneer Discreet Organic Superluminophores (DISCOS) as a new class of molecules that will circumvent any reliance on self-assembly, challenging long accepted views on how efficiently organic dyes can absorb and emit light, and serving as new tools to tackle a range of important longstanding research problems across traditional scientific boundaries.

Dr Congrave said: ‘If we can create colour-tunable emitters that deliver superluminophore-level performance without requiring aggregation, the implications for organic electronics and photonics will be transformative. DISCOS is designed to deliver the fundamental design rules and demonstrator materials that show this is possible.’

Find out more about Dr Congrave's research, and that of the other Oxford ERC Starting Grant recipients, here.