Personal Statement
Christophe Aïssa obtained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Malacria (University Paris 6, France) in 2001, focussing on the study of the factors influencing the outcome of transannular radical cyclisations cascades directed toward the synthesis of natural sesquiterpenes. He then joined Professor Fürstner group (MPI for coal research, Mülheim/Ruhr, Germany) as postdoctoral research assistant, working on the total synthesis of biologically active marine secondary metabolites. In 2003, he was appointed senior scientist within the same group, working further on total syntheses, but also on transition-metal catalysed reactions. In July 2007, he was appointed Lecturer at The University of Liverpool with a RCUK fellowship.

Personal Statement
Jontana completed her BSc. in Pathogology and Microbiology at the University of Bristol, and her MSc in Medical Science with focus in Infection Biology at Uppsala University. She then proceeded to obtain her PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Porto, in collaboration with the Center for Biofilm Engineering, Montana State University. Her research was part of the Print-aid Marie-Curie ITN consortium for the development of anti-biofilm 3D printed implants. Jontana's PhD research focused on the development of standardised biofilm methods and minimum information guidelines, with the goal of improving reproducibility within the field. She organised the first ring trial to evaluate the reproducibility of microplate based biofilm methods, as well as the formation of a minimum information guideline on these methods with the input of experts in the field. During her PhD she also developed and evaluated the repeatability of a four species urinary catheter (CAUTI) biofilm model using plate counts and flourescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) with confoncal microscopy (CSLM). Subsequently, she worked as a PDRA at the University of Glasgow, in affiliation with Glasgow Caledonian University, where her research focused on the application of drug-loaded wound dressings in combination with cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) for the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers (DFU), where she developed 5 species in vitro wound biofilm models. This work also included a clinical observational study of the microbiome and fungal burden of DFU swabs obtained from patients in the Royal Lancaster Infirmary.

Personal Statement
I am a computational materials scientist working across a number of research projects focused on designing new functional materials.

The main aim of my research is to understand how materials function at the atomic scale and use this knowledge to design new materials for separation, catalysis, energy storage and other applications. To achieve this we develop predictive computational tools that combine existing chemical knowledge (chemical databases) with computational chemistry (quantum and classical mechanics) and computer science methods (optimisation and machine learning).

Personal Statement
Dr. Heike Arnolds is a spectroscopist focussing on understanding protein-surface interactions and protein conformation from IR, Raman, SERS, fluorescence and sum-frequecy spectroscopy.
After an MSc on high-temperature superconductors in Oxford and her doctorate on Fourier Transform NMR on surfaces at the Department of Physics, Phillips-Universität Marburg, she started research in ultrafast surface dynamics and sum frequency spectroscopy as a postdoc at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge. She gained an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship to work on plasmon-enhanced photochemistry before moving to the University of Liverpool as lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and promotion to Senior Lecturer in 2017.
A PhD project funded by Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland led her into the wonderful world of protein-surface interactions and appreciation of linear spectroscopies. The latest work in the group ranges from understanding how proteins interact with silicas in reverse phase chromatography to how lipid bilayer curvature influences insulin adsorption.

Personal Statement
Dr. Bao has a multidisciplinary research background. After his Ph.D. study in experimental Condensed Matter Physics, he has worked in Semiconductor Physics for three years, (including the nano-fabrication, characterization, and modeling of thin-film transistors / planar nano-devices), in microwave device engineering for three years (including the fabrication/characterization of tuneable microwave devices), and in biophysics for ten years (including the electrophoresis of membrane proteins, LC crystal droplet biosensors, and microfluidics). His current research interests include biosensors, lipid membranes, synthetic cells, microfluidics, and antimicrobial surfaces.

Personal Statement
Neil Berry is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry within the University of Liverpool.

He is a graduate of Exeter College, University of Oxford where he gained his MChem in Chemistry (1999). He remained at Oxford for his DPhil (2002) under the supervision of Prof. Paul Beer.

He moved to the University of Liverpool in 2003 as a post-doctoral research fellow in computational chemistry funded by Romark L.C.. In 2005 he was appointed as a University Teacher in Organic Chemistry and continued his research activities. In 2007 he was appointed as a University Lecturer, promoted to senior lecturer in 2012, reader in 2017 and professor in 2019.

Based within the Department of Chemistry at the University of Liverpool, the group uses computational modelling including AI, machine learning and molecular modelling to solve problems in chemistry. The group’s research activities employ molecular modelling in the fields of medicinal chemistry, materials chemistry, reaction mechanisms and chemoinformatics in order to understand chemical systems more fully and predict molecular properties.

Personal Statement
Donna G Blackmond works broadly in the area of physical organic chemistry, focusing on experimental and computational studies of catalytic reactions of interest to the production of pharmaceuticals. She trained in Chemical Engineering in the US and has held professorships in both chemistry and chemical engineering in the US (University of Pittsburgh), Germany (Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung), and the UK (University of Hull; Imperial College London), and she has worked in the pharmaceutical industry (Merck). She is Professor of Chemistry and the John C. Martin Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California and is currently on sabbatical as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Materials Innovation in the Department of Chemistry. She holds joint US/UK citizenship.

Prof. Blackmond is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. She has been recognized internationally for her research including the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Award for Outstanding Women Scientists, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, and the IUPAC Award for Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering. She has been a Woodward Visiting Scholar at Harvard, a Miller Institute Research Fellow at Berkeley, and an NSF Visiting Professor at Princeton. Among other named lectureships, she has been the Merck Distinguished Lecturer at MIT, the Paul Gassmann Lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Givaudan-Karrer Lecturer at University of Zürich, the 8th Anton Vilsmeier Lecturer at the Universität Regensburg, the Lemieux Lecturer at University of Ottawa, the Laird Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, and the Gordon Lecturer at the University of Toronto. In 2021 she received a Humboldt-Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Research Overview
Prof. Blackmond’s research focuses on mechanistic studies of organic reactions, including asymmetric catalysis. She pioneered the methodology of “Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA)” for fundamental mechanistic studies of complex organic reactions as well as for streamlining pharmaceutical process research. A second fundamental area of her research focuses on seeking to understand the origin of life. She was a Simons Investigator in the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life where she studied prebiotic chemistry and the origin of biological homochirality. She has been invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to speak at two Nobel Workshops, “On the Origin of Life” (2006) and “Chiral Matter” (2021). Her current interest is in bringing information about reaction kinetic profiles into mechanistic studies in organic chemistry including ML/AI approaches. She collaborates with the University of Liverpool/Imperial College AIChemy project.

Personal Statement
Frédéric obtained his PhD in Chemistry in 2008 from the Université de Lyon and the Center for High Field NMR at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, under the supervision of Prof. Christophe Copéret and Prof. Lyndon Emsley. He studied the structure - dynamics relationship in heterogeneous catalysis and developed new solid state NMR methods to understand the chemistry of catalysts on surfaces. He then received a Lavoisier fellowship and underwent postdoctoral work at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, NY in 2008-2010 with Prof. Clare P. Grey, where he got interested in the understanding of the structure elucidation of energy materials with NMR spectroscopy. He then moved to the University of Cambridge as a Marie Curie fellow in 2011 and a Clare Hall research fellow and looked at the dynamics of oxygens and protons in electrolytes by high temperature NMR spectroscopy.
In December 2012, he was appointed to a Lectureship in the Department of Chemistry and the Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy at the University of Liverpool and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016, Reader in 2018 and to a Personal Chair in October 2021. where he is focusing on the development and application of NMR spectroscopy in materials chemistry. Frédéric's work aims at developing atomic scale structure – property correlations in complex functional materials for a diverse range of applications ranging from energy storage and conversion to catalysis that are captured from chemical processes understanding, most importantly how materials fail, and informed the design of new materials with improved performance and lifetime. The research methodology largely focuses on the development of new experimental and computational methods targeting advanced magnetic resonance spectroscopy capabilities to provide singular insights linking atomic scale understanding with dynamics behaviours to control chemical function. Recent work has focused on enhancing the NMR signal of unreceptive nuclei such as 17O at natural abundance or 89Y, on understanding complex disorder in solids that are uniquely captured by magnetic resonance and large scale modelling, and on exploiting the ability of NMR to probe dynamics to investigate a range of solid state ion transport materials identifying diffusion pathways. Further details can be found in the group website at http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~fblanc/WebsiteLiverpool/Home.html