Clare Bakewell

Clare received her MChem degree from the University of Leeds (2010), before moving to Imperial College London to conduct a PhD under the supervision of Profs Charlotte Williams and Nick Long, which was followed by an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship. After spending a year working for the start-up company Econic Technologies, she returned to Imperial for a postdoc with Prof Mark Crimmin. In October 2018, she started her independent career as a Ramsay Memorial Fellow at University College London. She joined the Department of Chemistry as King’s as a lecturer in October 2021.

The Group

Imogen Squire (PhD)

Imogen is a 2nd year PhD student, working on low oxidation state main-group complexes. She completed an MChem at the University of York in 2022, where she won the McCoy prize for scientific communication. Her Masters work focused on making dimolybdenum paddlewheel complexes. 

Michelangelo Tritto (PhD)

Mickey is a 1st year PhD student funded by the KCL Net Zero centre. He previously completed his MSci project in the group (2023), making main-group metal hydrides, exploring their reductive chemistry and analysing them computationally. Mickey was awarded the prestigious KCL Layton Science Research Award for his work.

Rick Collins (PDRA)

Rick joined the group in August 2023, and will be helping to look after the lab whilst Clare is on maternity leave. He’ll also be teaching in the inorganic section, as well as making lots of fun main-group precursors. Prior to this Rick completed his PhD with Prof. Richard Layfield (University of Manchester 2021, visiting student at University of Sussex) and a PDRA with Dr. Mark Chadwick (2021-2023) at Imperial College.

Matt de Vere-Tucker (PDRA)

Matt joined us in January 2024 and his project will be focused on low oxidation state main group compounds. Matt carried out his undergraduate degree in sunny Cardiff (2013-17), spending a year in warmer Hong Kong (2015-16) as part of it, before doing his PhD with Dr Andreas Stasch in the colder St Andrews (2017-22), with a project looking at alkaline earth metal compounds. After that, he spent a year as a postdoc at the very wet University of Manchester in the Willcox group (2023), looking at low oxidation state iron complexes.

RSC Dalton South Meeting November 2022

Lab 012 post-conference drinks

Katie’s Viva November 2021

Celebrating Katie passing her PhD viva with the Knapp group

2019-2020

Daniel Neo, Kam Poon, Martha Jennings, Katie Hobson, Clare

Alumni

Katie Hobson (PhD)

Katie was the first PhD student in the group, co-supervised by Prof Claire Carmalt. Her work focused on the synthesis of new aluminium hyrides and the exploration of their reactivity. Katie now works in chemical policy at DEFRA.

Kam Poon (MSci)

Kam was an MSci student in the group working on the development of photoswitchable ligands for controlled catalysis. Kam is now conducting a PhD at the Univeristy of Oxford with Prof Charlotte Williams.

Martha Jennings (MSci)

Martha was an MSci student in the group working on the synethesis silver precursors in collaboration with Dr Caroline Knapp.

Malavika Bhide (PDRA)

Malavika was the groups first PDRA. She received her MSci degree from UCL in 2018, after which she continued there to do her PhD working in the groups of Dr Caroline Knapp and Prof. Claire Carmalt. Her PhD was a joint synthetic and materials project and involved the synthesis, structural studies and AACVD of zinc precursors for thin film photovoltaics.

Juliana Morell (MSci)

Juliana was a MSci student in the group working on complexes containing metal-metal bonds. She was previously summer student in the lab, as part of the Kings Undergraduate Research Fellowship. She worked for GSK in Oral Health Regulatory Affairs from 2020-2021 as an industrial placement student.