Congratulations to Darren, who just published his first lead-author paper in Chemical Science! This marks our group’s second paper published within this month, following Terry’s achievement. The contact angle that water makes on a solid determines how it wets the surface, but experimental measurements for the water-graphene contact angle span a wide range, with no […]
Congratulations to Terry, who just published his first lead-author paper (J. Chem. Phys. 165, 144116 (2026)) over a summer project as an undergraduate student! His work is remarkably impressive, especially given that he was new to the field when he joined us. Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are often trained on vast datasets of reference […]
As the third poster prize won by a FAST group member this year — congrats to Joe, whose poster on machine learning potentials for realistic nanoporous carbons (depicted below) wowed the judges at the AiMat Summer School! The AiMat “Machine Learning for Molecules” Summer School was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology from 14 to […]
Following up from Willem’s achievement back in April, we are proud to say that Isaac has also won a poster prize at the joint TYC–LJC MMM Conference, with his poster titled “False Metallization in Short-Ranged Machine Learned Interatomic Potentials” — congratulations! The 2nd joint Thomas Young Centre and Lennard–Jones Centre Materials and Molecular Modelling Conference […]
As a farewell to Lucas’s all-too-short visit, the FAST group headed out yet again to the punts — but this time, to race up and down the River Cam as quickly as possible — and do some sightseeing along the way. We also had a formal dinner at Gonville & Caius College last week, with […]
Does water become more or less reactive when squeezed into gaps just a few molecules wide? Literature has disagreed for years. Using enhanced sampling molecular dynamics with machine-learned potentials, we found a surprisingly clean answer: confinement on its own doesn’t change water’s reactivity. Once you account for pressure and chemical potential, the apparent “confinement effect” […]
Congratulations to Willem, who won the poster prize at the CCP9 Conference and Community Meeting for his poster on the defect dynamics in Ice Ih, depicted below — well done! The CCP9 Meeting was held in Liverpool from 21 to 24 April 2026. Amongst the FAST group members, besides Willem, the meeting was also attended […]
A warm welcome to our newest batch of PhD students: Willem Farmilo and Joe Hart, who both joined in October 2025, and Thenmozhi Elango (part-time PhD), who was transferred into our group in February this year. Willem will be studying hydrogen bond networks in ice systems, with a view towards the diffusivity of hydrogen bonding […]
Clays are everywhere — from soil and contaminant transport to emerging energy technologies. But at the molecular level, the reactivity of their edge surfaces remains underexplored. In this work, now published as J. Phys. Chem. Lett. (2026) 17, 9, 2679–2688, we show that clay edges are not static arrays of functional groups, but dynamic proton-conducting […]
Niamh O’Neill undertook her viva today, and passed with minor corrections — many congratulations to Dr. O’Neill! During her tenure with the FAST group, Niamh’s research focused on studying ion paring interactions at chemical accuracy and beyond, as well as scaling coupled cluster calculations for high-accuracy condensed phase simulations. She will be starting a postdoc […]