Zoe Pikramenou

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

The research programme in Zoe Pikramenou’s group includes inorganic chemistry, photophysics and nanoscience to tackle luminescence imaging in biological cells, liquid flows and surfaces. Their projects are interdisciplinary, involving collaboration with medical scientists, chemical engineers and biochemists. They use nanoparticles as scaffolds to carry both luminescent and MRI active probes in cells for multimodal imaging. They study their targeted delivery in cells using peptide and other biomolecular recognition motifs. For the probe design they use different ligand and coordination chemistries to prepare molecular lanthanide and transition metal probes and optimise their luminescent signals.

The group uses different imaging techniques to study the nanoparticle presence in cells. They also study nanoparticles in flow systems and microchannels that have applications in chemical reactions and blood circulation studies. In a project that involves optoelectronic devices they study the modification of surfaces with lanthanide and transition metal probes using recognition and supramolecular chemistry to study their sensing properties for small molecules and their properties in building opto- and electro-active wires.