Dr Shiny Mathew

Research Project: Defect diffusion in photocatalytic titanium dioxide
Supervisors: Robert Palgrave (UCL), David McPhail & David Payne (Imperial)

Shiny graduated with an MSci in Chemistry from UCL in 2014. Her Masters research project was in computational chemistry investigating the mechanistic role of nanoparticle co-catalysts in semiconductor photocatalysis. and was supervised by Professor Richard Catlow. Shiny is continuing her research in the field of photocatalysis for her PhD in Materials Chemistry in the CDT-ACM. She is studying the structure-function relationship in titania, particularly looking at the control of the spatial distribution of dopants in titania, to help design novel catalysts with optimised photocatalytic activity, for the application of water splitting for hydrogen production. Shiny uses techniques such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, UV-vis spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction to characterise her titania based materials to understand their electronic, optical and structural properties.