"DAN" Design at the nanoscale -Francesca Baletto's group
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Francesca Baletto  got her PhD from the Physics Department at the University of Genova (Italy) in June 2003. She was a UNESCO fellow at ICTP, Trieste (Italy) between 2003-2006 and then she works as reserach associate at DMSE, MIT, (USA) until July 2007 in the QuasiAmore group (PI-Marzari). She moved to KCL in August 2007 as Lecturer, promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2013, and recently June 2018 to Reader.

She is married and mum of two children (Tommaso and Matteo, who can be considered active members of the group). No much free time left, but once she enjoyed playing volleyball, sky, hiking, reading and going to cinema and theatre. Now she is happy to have some time to play LEGO at home.

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Dr. Vagner Rigo joint the group end of June 2016 thanks to a prestigious Science without Border fellowship sponsored by the Brazilian Governmnet. His expertise are in the field of Density-Functionla Theory with a focus on catalysis. Vagner holds a tenure-track position at UFTPR (Brazil).
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Dr Gian Giacomo Asara, got his PhD from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona (Spain) Group in October 2014. He joined the group in January 2015. After a gap year in the private sector, Gian is back to his research work on the design of efficient nanocatalysts, thanks to a NMS Faculty fellowship. He is actually moved to the editorial sector. Enjoy this new adventure!
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Dr. Oliver Paz-Borbon got his PhD form University of Birmingham. He joined the group between July 2013 until Novemebr 2014. he is now a tenure-track at UNAM, Mexico City and he is still actively collaborating with the group on catalytic properties of nanoparticles
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Dr. Cono DiPaola got his PhD from University of Rome. He was a member of the gorup within September 2009 until September 2012. After a period at UCL he is now back at KCL, and we still collaborating on magnetic properties at the nanoscale.

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Welcome to Robert! Robert Jones joined the group inOct. 2019 and he will study the photocatalytic properties of AuPt nanoparticles for water splitting.
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Welcome to Wei! Wei Zhao joined the group in Oct. 2018. He will investigate optical properties of noble clusters. A "hot" subject! A very thrilling news as Wei got married :) Our warmest congrats and now keep editing papers and your thesis!
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Welcome to Sofia!!! Sofia Zinzani joined the DAN group in June 2022, for her MSc thesis at the Physics Department, University of Milan (where the DAN group is based now). She is working on modelling the formation of AuPd nano alloys in vacuum and in an environment.

Former members

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CONGRATS TO CLAUDIO!!! Even under the most unforeseen situation, Claudio successfully passed his viva on March 2020. Well done! After a 6-months in the industry, Claudio moved as a research assistant at SISSA, Trieste and in June 2022 he became a senior scientist at Microsoft (Cambridge). Claudio continues to be our ML expert. We still work on showing the size-transferability of ML force field on metallic nanoparticles (soon a golden perspective!).
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CONGRATS TO KEVIN! In Nov. 2018, Kevin recently passed his PhD viva. He is currently a postdoc at EPFL (Swiss) under a prestigious Marie Curie fellowship. Well done Kevin!! "Dr." Kevin Rossi started his MPhil in Sept. 2014 and he successfully passed his MPhil/PhD viva in February 2016. he contributed to the investigation of structural transformations at the nanoscale and on nanothermodynamics. Recently, he contributed to the definition of nanogenomics, and its further consequences in nano catalysis. Fully involved in the LoDiS development. !
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CONGRATS TO LAIA! She got her PhD title and now she works as Communications Coordinator for COG-Uk and COG-Train. In the meanwhile, she enjoys to create nice video, as the one on the melting at the nanoscale (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQFbgJQagvQ).
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Luca Pavan got his PhD in April 2015 on a thesis on "STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN METALLIC NANOPARTICLES". He implemented the Metadynamics algorithm within LoDiS. This PhD thesis is a fundamental contribution for the study of the dynamical evolution of nanosystems.

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James Finn got his PhD in 2011 on a work on "Anionic water systems and ozone depletion: an ab-initio investigation". He is now a fantastic high school teacher.

Visiting students

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Toni Salom Catalan (URV) spent a HPC3 visit with us, Oct-Dec. 2019. We study the effect of THF on small Rh by AIMD. 

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Omar Lopez Estrada joined the group Feb-March 2016 as PhD visiting student. He got in June his PhD from UNAM. Congrats Omar! We are collaborating on a project on the magnetism of Al-based nanoparticles.

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Yes Yeen Soon visited our group in Oct. 2015- Jan 2016 from Univ. Saint Malaysia, supported by a MyBrainSc scholarship funded by the Malaysian Government. She worked on structural transition in monometallic clusters, and on the magnetic properties of Ir, Rh, Pd and Pt at small sizes. Recently she got her Master, our warmest congrats Yee Yeen!


Several undergrad internships and Msci where taken within the group

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Environment & nanoparticles

Norbert Zicher, Shakeel Khan gave their important contribution to this research line. Norbert is currently understanding the VMG force field for mimicking the metallic nanoparticle/oxide support interaction. For this project, Norbert won the 2015 KURF Research price at KCL. Congrats Norbert! Summer 2018, Pascal Salzbrenner won a prestigious KURF fellowship and he studied the effect of a "liquid" environment on the thermal stability of Pt-nanoparticles. 


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Growth&assembly at the nanoscale

Irina Parsina and Laura Bazeley use the one-by-one method for studying AgCo and PtNi cases. Mohammad Abedi (Physics undergrad internship 2016) has implemented the coalescence of metallic nanoparticles within the LoDiS software.
Summer 2018, Matteo Tiberi has improved and used the coalescence tool and some interesting results have been observed. Well done!
 
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LoDiS implementation

A few Msci students gave their contribution to study the feasibility of the implementation of the Metadynamics algortihm within the LoDiS suite. Among them, Vishal Puroit, Alvin Got. Zac Shabka (2016 KURF) implemented the calculation of the vibrational spectrum. Kent Hou Man  (Physics internship 2016) help us to "pythonsize" the post-processing and to add some technical features to the code to speed up the calculations. Summer 2018, Pankaj Kumar work on the use of supported vector machine for the classification of nanoparticles. Armand Alquier (MSci Oct. 2019) continues on this direction. We are looking for powerful descriptors.  Jacopo Masciatelli helped in the developed of LoDiS for thermochemical reactions, starting point towards our nanoCHE model. Elena Gazzarrini starts in Oct. 2019 her MSci project on CO2RR on Cu-nanoparticles, as a further application of our nanoCHE model. 

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