̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Jenny Zhang

Four Cambridge researchers awarded consolidator grants from the European Research Council

cg605 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 12:54:39 +0000

̽��ֱ��grants are part of the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. They are given to excellent scientists and scholars at the career stage to support them to pursue their most promising scientific ideas.

Cambridge scientists, Professor Chiara Ciccarelli, Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara, Professor Jason Miller, and Dr Jenny Zhang have been named as awardees of ERC consolidator grants.

Professor Chiara Ciccarelli

Chiara Ciccarelli is Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the Department of Physics. She is a Royal Society ̽��ֱ�� Research Fellow and a Fellow and Director of Studies at St Catharine's College. She said: “Our group studies magnets and seeks ways to write and read their magnetic state as fast and as energy-efficiently as possible. This is because magnets remain the best way, that we know of, to store digital data for a long time.

“Our ERC project, PICaSSO, explores new ways to ‘write’ magnets at low temperature by interfacing them with superconductors. Although this research is still at an early stage, it would allow the development of ultra-energy-efficient cryogenic memories, a necessary requirement for the realistic scaling of quantum computers.

“I am absolutely delighted to have been awarded a consolidator grant. It is an incredible opportunity to do great science and an important recognition of the work of my amazing team.”

Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara

Rosana Collepardo-Guevara is Professor of Computational and Molecular Biophysics at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and the Department of Genetics. She is a Winton Advanced Research Fellow in physics, a director of postgraduate education for chemistry and a Fellow of Clare College. She said: “My group investigates the connection between genome structure and function by developing computer models and algorithms that can bridge scales, from atoms to genes, while considering the extensive chemical diversity of the genome.

“We will investigate the transformative hypothesis of phase transitions in genome organisation, which suggests that our genes are organised inside functionally diverse liquid drops. We will develop new computer models to probe how the physical properties of these droplets are regulated, and how this may contribute to the tight regulation of our genes.

“I am truly delighted and proud of my team. This success is owed to the exceptional students and postdocs that I’ve had the privilege to supervise over the years, and also to the support of my mentors, collaborators, and family. This grant will give us the opportunity to keep exploring radical ideas.”

Professor Jason Miller

Jason Miller is a professor in the Statistics Laboratory and a Fellow of Trinity College. He said: “My research is at the interface of probability theory with complex analysis, combinatorics, and geometry. ̽��ֱ��questions I study arise from models in statistical physics which are exactly at a critical point between a phase transition.

“My ERC project will be investigating critical random media in two dimensions, including models of how fluid flows through a porous medium and how the spins organise themselves in a magnet. ̽��ֱ��focus will be the study of their fractal structure and diffusion properties.

“I am very pleased to have received the grant. With the support that it provides, I will be able to form a research group to tackle longstanding questions in the area.”

Dr Jenny Zhang

Dr Jenny Zhang is a BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellow at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She said: “My team focuses on creating toolsets for rewiring the electrochemical pathways associated with living systems, particularly photosynthetic organisms. We do this to better understand fundamental bioenergetics and to manipulate them for various applications, such as in renewable energy generation.

“This ERC project develops an exciting new approach for accelerating the creation of synergistic interactions between biological and non-biological materials for highly efficient and robust energy exchange. ̽��ֱ��ultimate aim is to generate high performing biohybrid materials for clean energy generation.

“I am absolutely thrilled to be awarded this unique grant, which recognises all the key ingredients needed for innovation. This wonderful result was a cumulation of a lot of hard work, but also the generous support of my wonderful team and colleagues. I could not be more grateful for both the grant and the people I get to work with.”

Scientists at UK institutions have won the second greatest number of grants in Europe. Across Europe, the number of women receiving grants has increased for the third year running.

“I extend my heartfelt congratulations to all the brilliant researchers who have been selected for ERC Consolidator Grants,” said Iliana Ivanova, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth. “I'm especially thrilled to note the significant increase in the representation of women among the winners for the third consecutive year in this prestigious grant competition. This positive trend not only reflects the outstanding contributions of women researchers but also highlights the strides we are making towards a more inclusive and diverse scientific community.”

̽��ֱ��ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe.

̽��ֱ��European Research Council (ERC) has awarded grants worth a total of €627 million to 308 researchers across Europe, of whom four are at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

This grant will give us the opportunity to keep exploring radical ideas.

Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara

Jenny Zhang - Nathan Pitt, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Left to right: Professor Chiara Ciccarelli, Professor Jason Miller, Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara, and Dr Jenny Zhang

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Photosynthesis ‘hack’ could lead to new ways of generating renewable energy

sc604 — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 15:57:53 +0000

Researchers have ‘hacked’ the earliest stages of photosynthesis, the natural machine that powers the vast majority of life on Earth, and discovered new ways to extract energy from the process, a finding that could lead to new ways of generating clean fuel and renewable energy.

Tiny ‘skyscrapers’ help bacteria convert sunlight into electricity

sc604 — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 16:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, used 3D printing to create grids of high-rise ‘nano-housing’ where sun-loving bacteria can grow quickly. ̽��ֱ��researchers were then able to extract the bacteria’s waste electrons, left over from photosynthesis, which could be used to power small electronics.

Other research teams have extracted energy from photosynthetic bacteria, but the Cambridge researchers have found that providing them with the right kind of home increases the amount of energy they can extract by over an order of magnitude. ̽��ֱ��approach is competitive against traditional methods of renewable bioenergy generation and has already reached solar conversion efficiencies that can outcompete many current methods of biofuel generation.

Their results, reported in the journal Nature Materials, open new avenues in bioenergy generation and suggest that ‘biohybrid’ sources of solar energy could be an important component in the zero-carbon energy mix.

Current renewable technologies, such as silicon-based solar cells and biofuels, are far superior to fossil fuels in terms of carbon emissions, but they also have limitations, such as a reliance on mining, challenges in recycling, and a reliance on farming and land use, which results in biodiversity loss.

“Our approach is a step towards making even more sustainable renewable energy devices for the future,” said Dr Jenny Zhang from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, who led the research.

Zhang and her colleagues from the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy are working to rethink bioenergy into something that is sustainable and scalable.

Photosynthetic bacteria, or cyanobacteria, are the most abundant life from on Earth. For several years, researchers have been attempting to ‘re-wire’ the photosynthesis mechanisms of cyanobacteria in order to extract energy from them.

“There’s been a bottleneck in terms of how much energy you can actually extract from photosynthetic systems, but no one understood where the bottleneck was,” said Zhang. “Most scientists assumed that the bottleneck was on the biological side, in the bacteria, but we’ve found that a substantial bottleneck is actually on the material side.”

In order to grow, cyanobacteria need lots of sunlight – like the surface of a lake in summertime. And in order to extract the energy they produce through photosynthesis, the bacteria need to be attached to electrodes.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge team 3D-printed custom electrodes out of metal oxide nanoparticles that are tailored to work with the cyanobacteria as they perform photosynthesis. ̽��ֱ��electrodes were printed as highly branched, densely packed pillar structures, like a tiny city.

Zhang’s team developed a printing technique that allows control over multiple length scales, making the structures highly customisable, which could benefit a wide range of fields.

“ ̽��ֱ��electrodes have excellent light-handling properties, like a high-rise apartment with lots of windows,” said Zhang. “Cyanobacteria need something they can attach to and form a community with their neighbours. Our electrodes allow for a balance between lots of surface area and lots of light – like a glass skyscraper.”

Once the self-assembling cyanobacteria were in their new ‘wired’ home, the researchers found that they were more efficient than other current bioenergy technologies, such as biofuels. ̽��ֱ��technique increased the amount of energy extracted by over an order of magnitude over other methods for producing bioenergy from photosynthesis.

“I was surprised we were able to achieve the numbers we did – similar numbers have been predicted for many years, but this is the first time that these numbers have been shown experimentally,” said Zhang. “Cyanobacteria are versatile chemical factories. Our approach allows us to tap into their energy conversion pathway at an early point, which helps us understand how they carry out energy conversion so we can use their natural pathways for renewable fuel or chemical generation.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Cambridge Trust, the Isaac Newton Trust and the European Research Council. Jenny Zhang is BBSRC David Phillips Fellow in the Department of Chemistry, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Xiaolong Chen et al. ‘3D-printed hierarchical pillar array electrodes for high performance semi-artificial photosynthesis.’ Nature Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-022-01205-5

Researchers have made tiny ‘skyscrapers’ for communities of bacteria, helping them to generate electricity from just sunlight and water.

Our approach is a step towards making even more sustainable renewable energy devices for the future

Jenny Zhang

Gabriella Bocchetti

3D-printed custom electrodes

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Women in STEM: Dr Jenny Zhang

sc604 — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 07:00:00 +0000

It was my mother who first got me interested in science. When I was very young, back when I was growing up China, she used to tell me bedtime stories about the origins of thunder and lightning, how radios work, or how eggs became chickens. This apparently had a profound effect on me. Eggs would regularly go missing from the kitchen and turn up buried snugly under some blankets in bed. Or the new radio would be found dismantled, presumably taken apart by someone who wanted a better look inside...

My PhD research was in medicinal chemistry. My aim was to design anti-cancer drugs that could penetrate deep into solid tumours. To achieve this, I synthesised a library of novel DNA intercalators and anti-cancer platinum complexes and studied their bio-distribution and metabolism within 3D-tumour models using a variety of chemical imaging techniques. My research was very much directed by the problem, which gave me opportunities to travel around the world to work in different labs and disciplines. I was able to arrive at new drug design strategies using this approach.

Environmental sustainability is important to me, so that’s why I moved into artificial photosynthesis. My PhD research was highly interdisciplinary and I developed a deep appreciation of how different approaches can breathe fresh ideas into old problems and can often catalyse breakthroughs. Artificial photosynthesis for sustainable fuel development is also a highly interdisciplinary field, and as a research area, it aligns with my personal values about the importance of environmental sustainability.

I came to the Department of Chemistry more than five years ago as a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellow to work on artificial photosynthesis in Professor Erwin Reisner’s group. I was excited by the notion that, coming from quite a different background, I would be able to bring unique perspectives into the field. I also liked the idea of being immersed in a new learning experience. It turned out to be more challenging – and at the same time more fulfilling – than I expected.

We’ve designed new catalytic systems to turn sunlight into 'solar fuels'. In my postdoctoral research, I was interested in turning sunlight into chemical fuels we call 'solar fuels' – sustainable and green alternatives to our current unsustainable and polluting carbon-based fuels. Plants have been carrying out this for millions of years through the process of photosynthesis, enabled by a set of special proteins that make up the photosynthetic electron transport chain. I coordinated a team that studied these enzymes and the reactions that they carry out. We incorporated them into several prototype systems that can use sunlight to turn water into hydrogen. We hope this work will help make such fuels available to everyone in future.

We still need to understand the basic chemistry and physics behind many components of photosynthesis. There are many fundamental questions that remain to be answered both within biological and artificial photosynthetic systems. Mainly, these relate to the flow of electrons and how they can be more efficiently generated and used in catalysis. During my postdoctoral research, I wired photosystem II, nature’s water oxidation enzyme that kick-starts photosynthesis, to custom-made electrodes to study enzyme functionality and to perform light-driven fuel forming reactions. This allowed me to understand the ‘bottlenecks’ of different types of photosynthetic systems, and where improvements need to be made.

My BBSRC Fellowship allows me to drive my own research vision with my own research group. I started my own research group in 2018, and my focus is to develop new tools and approaches for studying photosynthesis (both biological and artificial) and utilising it in renewable energy generation and agricultural/sensor technologies. I’m supported by a generous grant that enables me to have postdocs and the necessary equipment – in particular, a sophisticated 3D printer that can print a large variety of materials, from living cells to metals.

̽��ֱ��Fellowship will also help me build my leadership skills. It aims to get Fellows on the trajectory to leading our own research groups confidently and successfully. We have a BBSRC mentor that comes to visit our lab once a year. I’ve also attended workshops where I learned about the economy of science and leadership. I really like that this scheme offers not just money but the necessary support to help me become a well-rounded leader in science. I feel incredibly lucky to have this opportunity.

I hope my career will lead to the uncovering of many ‘unknown unknowns’. I want to drive innovative and high-value research that addresses important problems in our world today, and I want to achieve this while fostering a healthy and positive lab culture. Like any scientist, I hope my career will lead to the uncovering of many ‘unknown unknowns’ that will leave a positive impact on the world.

It’s important to me that we inspire more students – both girls and boys – to choose science. I still turn up to meetings and workshops where I am either the only woman or one of the few women present. However, this is happening less and less, and I feel that there is a real effort being made by our institutions to be inclusive and to lower barriers. ̽��ֱ��old barriers still exist, but I’m optimistic since I know how determined women can be.

In the meantime, I think we shouldn’t forget about positive action being needed to foster men to challenge their own status quo to become strong counterparts of the future.

Dr Jenny Zhang is a group leader and BBSRC David Phillips Fellow in the Department of Chemistry, where she is re-wiring photosynthesis to generate renewable fuels. Here, she tells us about why she switched from cancer research to sustainability, how her Fellowship programme is helping her develop leadership skills, and why eggs in her childhood home would regularly go missing.

Yes