26/06/2026 — Mina and Rui Rui graduate
Mina and Rui Rui had their graduation ceremony for their Msci (with Markus there to support them on stage). Mina plans to take a gap year before applying to PhDs.
Both of them did exceptional work during their short time with us and all of us here wish them the very best for their future!
26/06/2026 — The group says goodbye to Margaux and Ariel
After 4 months as research intern, Margaux returns to France to complete engineering school in Marseille. It was a pleasure having her here and we wish her all the best in her future endeavors - not before a well-earned summer break though!
Ariel also returns to complete his PhD with his group in Brazil. After just over a year here with us, he made some excellent progress and obtained a lot of results for both his own thesis and our collaborative work. We hope to see him again soon!
The group sent them off with a barbecue in Peter’s garden :)
15/02/2026 — Welcome Margaux and Saif!
February was a big month for us - we welcomed not one, but two new group members!
Margaux joins us from Marseille where she attends engineering school. She will be with us until June as part of her degree’s international research placement and will work on further developing the hollow core fibre trap.
Saif joins us from the UAE - he brings with him a wealth of knowledge from his multi-year career as a research scientist prior to coming to UCL to complete his PhD. He intends to push his PhD towards fundamental physics and testing quantum gravity.
10/01/2026 Markus awarded the Wellcome Early-Career Funding Award!
Back in December Markus became one of a select few to be awarded the highly competitive Wellcome Early-Career Awards! He will stay with the group and continue his work developing new means of imaging and characterising biological samples using optical manipulation techniques.
This also bumps him up from plain old postdoc to research fellow. How fancy.
02/10/2025 — The group says bye-bye to Jon
The group headed to Peter’s house for lunch and a walk (and some pineapple upside down cake) to send off our very own Jon, who will be going to work at with Dr Jack Devlin as part of Imperial’s axion microwave cavity group.
Jon did his undergrad, PhD and first postdoc at UCL so to say he was a part of the furniture is an understatement. There are not many postdocs as beloved as Jon, and he is always ready to drop everything to help someone else out - we are very fond of him and although we are sad to see him go, his time here has come to its end and we wish him the very best at Imperial!
Bye-bye Jon!
