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At Scotland’s kick-off event for the International Year of Light, which took place on 23/2/2015 in Edinburgh, Marcel Schubert and Markus Karl explain to the general public how lasers work and how we plan to bring them to life in future biolasers. Co-starring with Marcel and Markus was a small “open cavity” laser that was … Read more

Andrew Morton and Laura Tropf have joined the Gather Lab from the beginning of 2015. Andrew has done his PhD on neurobiology. He will complement the team’s cell biology expertise and will help with testing and appying the new photonic tools developed by the group. Laura does her PhD on strong light-matter coupling in optical microstructures based … Read more

We have several exciting PhD opportunities open just now. New photonics tools unravel the mysteries and mechanics of biological cells Living Lasers: Lasing from biological cells Aligning molecules to improve efficiency in next generation organic LEDs OLED micro-displays as biophotonic platform Find more details in the PhD projects section of the School’s website.

The Wellcome Trust is funding strategic support at St Andrews to strengthen research at the interface of chemistry, biology, physics and medicine. These would typically be a precursor to more substantive funding. Details may be found at this website: http://synergy.st-andrews.ac.uk/issf/

This week Dr Nils Kronenberg from the Gatherlab presented the groups novel sensor for measuring cell forces at the meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology / International Forum for Cell Biology. Some 300 cell biologists attended Nils’ presentation.

Malte Gather and Andy Yun at Harvard Medical School / Mass General Hospital have published in Nature Communications how the special molecular structure of fluorescent proteins enables high luminenscence and excellent optical gain in the solid-state form of the protein. See here for the University of St Andrews press release on the matter. See here for the … Read more

This Tuesday the Gatherlab has presented for the first time extensive work on a novel type of sensor capable of measuring the forces exerted by individual cells and their focal adhesions. The work was presented as an invited talk in Symposium D: Materials and Concepts for Biomedical Sensing at the MRS Fall Meeting in Boston.

Together with Martin Hill from University of Western Australia, Malte Gather has written a review for Nature Photonics on the the development of ever smaller lasers for applications in communications and in emerging fields including in biophotonics. The paper is featured on the cover of the December issue of the journal. Find the paper here.

A postdoctoral position is available immediately to explore both fundamental and applied aspects of organic semiconductors by investigating exciton diffusion in organic semiconductors and exploring applications of patterned organic semiconductor devices to biophotonics.  Further details and link to application forms here.

During his Photonics Seminar talk this week Jun-Prof Sebastian Reineke (TU Dresden) presented his work on the use of organic semiconductors as nanoscale energy manipulators and on integrated organic devices with complex lateral structures.