TYC Student Day winners announced

Erlend Davidson, a student within the London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL, has this week been awarded first prize for Best Talk at the 2011 Thomas Young Centre (TYC) Student Day.

The annual event, held this year at Imperial College London, saw talks by eight shortlisted students from the TYC. These talks aimed to showcase a selection of the many topics being worked upon across the TYC, ranging from biomolecular modelling to nanochemistry to large-scale quantum mechanics simulations.

The panel of judges, taken from the management team of the TYC, included Professor Mike Finnis, Professor Angelos Michaelides, Professor Alessandro De Vita, Dr. Arash Mostofi, and the guest speaker Professor Lindsay Greer from the University of Cambridge. All judges agreed that the talks were of exceptional quality and finally settled upon Erlend's talk on "H2 formation on graphene: the combined role of van der Waals and quantum tunnelling" as the winner.

Erlend's prize winning talk described his recent computer simulations of hydrogen at graphene using novel state of the art techniques.

Standard simulation techniques have been extremely successful at understanding and characterising surfaces. Despite this there are two important physical phenomena which are not normally accounted for: long-range dispersion and quantum nuclear effects. Recent developments mean it is now possible to include these effects in a consistent fashion, and in the specific case of hydrogen at graphene we see a considerable reduction of the barrier for the chemical adsorption of hydrogen onto the graphene sheet. This may help astrophysics understand the mechanism for the formation of H2 in space, and will have consequences for industrial catalytic processes. By including these effects we are able to correctly describe a much wider range of materials and processes.

"I enjoyed listening to the talks and sharing my research with the Thomas Young Centre. I'm really happy to learn that my efforts won first prize. I'd like to thank the TYC staff for organising the event, and I hope they continue to do so in future years. I'm also like to thank my group for support and advice" said Erlend after the event.

Following closely behind Erlend were runners up Kate Roberts (KCL) with her talk "Unbiased degree-preserving randomisation of directed graphs" and Joseph Bamidele (KCL) with his talk "Surface scanning probe tip fingerprinting".

Erlend received an Amazon Kindle 3G and Kate and Joseph each received a £50 Amazon voucher. Congratulations to them all.

See here for the 2011 TYC Student Day Programme.