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Contact & Profiles

Professor Fiona Meldrum

Principle Investigator

Email: F.Meldrum@leeds.ac.uk

Fiona Meldrum holds a chair in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Leeds, where her research centres on bio-inspired materials chemistry, and in particular on inorganic crystallisation.  She obtained her undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1989, and her doctorate in biological crystallization from the University of Bath in 1992.  Following a postdoctoral position at the University of Syracuse, USA she carried out further postdoctoral work at the Max Plank Institute of Polymerforschung, Mainz, Germany under award of a Humbold Research Fellowship.  Fiona then joined the Australian National University in Canberra as a Research Fellow, before returning to the UK to take up a lectureship at Queen Mary, University of London in 1998.  She moved to the School of Chemistry, University of Bristol in 2003 and joined the University of Leeds in 2009.  She has been the recipient of a number of awards including an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, an RSC Interdisciplinary prize and an ERC Advanced Grant.  Her research focuses on crystallization, with particular emphasis on biomineralization and bio-inspired crystal growth, where natural systems are used as an inspiration for the design and synthesis of crystalline and amorphous minerals.  She currently has particular interests in the effects of confinement on crystallization and the formation of crystals with composite structures.

Dr. Johanna Galloway

Job Title: Postdoctoral research assistant.

Email: j.m.galloway@leeds.ac.uk

Dr Johanna Galloway’s research is multidisciplinary, with focus on the study of biomolecule self-assembly, biomineralisation and biotemplated mineralisation. Her current interests include probing how confinement alters the self-assembly of biomolecules, and developing tools to study how the confinement of biotemplating molecules alters their control on biomineralisation.

She obtained her PhD from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds in 2012 in, “Biotemplating Arrays of Nanomagnets using the Biomineralisation Protein Mms6,” (supervisor Dr. Sarah Staniland). After this, she completed a 2 year Doctoral Prize Fellowship, also hosted in Physics at Leeds, where she made patterned thin-films of nanoparticles using biotemplating peptides not found in natural systems, to move towards developing biotemplated magnetic data storage. She then moved to a post-doctoral researcher position in Dek Woolfson’s Group in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol in 2015 where she designed, made, characterised and functionalised self-assembling proteins and peptides. In 2018, she joined Fiona Meldrum’s group in the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, where she has been developing methods to study the self-assembly of soft-matter biotemplating molecules and their subsequent mineralisation action in confinement.

Dr. Liam Hunter

Job Title: Postdoctoral research assistant.

Email: l.hunter@leeds.ac.uk

Dr. Liam Hunter joined the Meldrum group after completing his PhD using microfluidics to detect single molecules and investigate the mechanical properties of microfluidic devices. His current research is focused on crystallisation processes on chip and developing methods to interact with nucleation and crystal growth including using droplet-based microfluidic devices to isolate reaction vessels and study multiple nucleation events independently on a small scale.

Dr. Xuefeng He

Job Title: Postdoctoral research assistant.

Email: chmxhe@leeds.ac.uk

Dr. Xuefeng He’s research is focused on the multiphase transport and interfacial phenomenon in microfluidic systems.

He received his PhD degree in Chongqing University, China, 2018. After that he joined Prof. Qiang Liao’s group as a postdoc researcher. His previous research mainly focused on heat and mass transfer in laser-assisted microfluidic devices. He joined Prof. Fiona Meldrum’s group in the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds as a postdoctoral research assistant in 2019. His current research is using microfluidic methods to study the crystallization process, and developing high-efficient on-chip crystallization analytical platform.

Ilaria Sandei

Job Title: PhD student

Email: cmis@leeds.ac.uk

Ilaria Sandei joined Professor Fiona Meldrum’s group as a PhD student in 2018. Her research is interdisciplinary, with focus on bioinspired crystallisation of calcium carbonate and ice. Specifically, her research interests involve the study of crystallisation in presence of different kinds of biomolecules, with the aim to achieve polymorph selection and templating effect over the crystal structures.

Before joining the group, she completed her Master in Photochemistry and Molecular Materials at the University of Bologna, Italy, where she worked on the synthesis and characterisation of gelatin-based scaffolds functionalised with antioxidant molecules.

In 2016 she completed her undergraduate studies in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Bologna, working on the synthesis under inert atmosphere of Pt-based clusters and their further characterisation.

Currently, she has been working on the synthesis of inorganic crystals in presence of biomolecules, in order to provide insights into the polymorph selection, templating, and morphology control processes.

Jorin Hasselt

Job Title: PhD student

Email: cmljh@leeds.ac.uk

My name is Jorin Hasselt and I have a M.Sc. in Material Sciences (University of Stuttgart) and B.Sc. in Geosciences (University of Göttingen). I am currently doing a PhD in Chemistry with Prof. Fiona Meldrum. My scientific career has led me to develop a deep interest in the topic of biomineralisation. Already during my master thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research Heidelberg, I have been working on the effects of confinement on the mineralisation of CaCO3. I am currently working on the bio-inspired mineralization of organic crystals and on soft templated mineralisation.

When I am not at work, I spend most of my time with my two small sons and my girlfriend, or I meet with friends to cook, play boardgames or just to chat.

Whenever there is a chance to, I travel with (or without) my family to visit family and friends in Germany and Sardinia or just to see the world, have a good hike or do some wind-fuelled water sports.

Xiaoyue Wu

Job Title: PhD student

Email: cmxwu@leeds.ac.uk

Xiaoyue Wu is a PhD student who joined the Meldrum group in 2020 and will be working on studying crystallization process in confinement. She hopes to use nanopipettes to introduce nucleating agents into droplets of inorganic solutions to trigger nucleation. She will also be working on tuning interactions between colloids to control the crystal structure formation.

Before joining the group, she completed her Master of Chemistry degree at the University of Oxford (Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Department), working on measuring the structural forces of colloidal crystals under confinement using the surface force balance under Professor Susan Perkin. She also completed a summer project on measuring the electrocapillary at the interface between mercury and concentrated electrolyte using the pendant drop method.

She hopes to use her understanding of the liquid state and her background on soft matter to contribute to the understanding of crystallization process at various length scales, from small ions to big colloids.