CDT Showcase 2025
The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Molecules Showcase took place on Wednesday 16th and Thursday 17th July 2025, at The Village Hotel, Leeds North.
Showcase programme:
Speaker Biographies:
Lorna Dougan - University of Leeds
Lorna is a Professor of Physics, an ERC Consolidator Fellow and an EPSRC Public Engagement Champion. She is the Chair of the British Biophysical Society.
Lorna is a physicist by training (MPhys and PhD, University of Edinburgh). Lorna currently leads an ERC Fellowship to explore the structure and mechanics of proteins across length scales and to exploit functional proteins as building blocks in biomaterials. Lorna's wider research interests span hierarchical biomechanics, extreme biophysics, liquid structure, life in extreme environments and (bottom-up) synthetic biology. She is passionate about science communication and active in arts-science collaborative opportunities.
Anju Massey-Brooker - Royal Society of Chemistry
Professor Anju Massey-Brooker is the Programme lead for the RSC’s Sustainable Polymers in Liquid Formulations SPLFs). In this role Anju acted as the secretariat for the RSC’s Sustainable PLFs cross sectoral Industry Task Force, which led to the creation and publication of the Sustainable PLFs roadmap. Currently, Anju holds several honorary positions including, Professor in Practice at Durham University, Senior Research Fellow at University of Birmingham, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and was a former member of the EPSRC strategic Advisory Team for Physical Sciences and Circular Economy.
Anju has successfully led bids to win several multi-million euro/pound European Commission and UKRI funded high-impact private-public sector collaborative programmes and acts as the project coordinator for these programmes. Before joining the RSC, Anju held the position of R&D Director-Principal Scientist at Procter & Gamble and has 28 years’ experience in leading product and technology innovation programmes, working on some of P&G’s best-known brands that resulted in several billion dollars of sales globally and enabled P&G’s expansion into new markets. During her career, Anju has won multiple innovation awards and is an inventor on over 50 patents. Anju holds a PhD in Organometallic Chemistry from the University of Cambridge.
Ilona Kretzschmar - City College of New York
Ilona Kretzschmar received her Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin in 1999.
During her graduate research with Prof. H. Schwarz, she studied reactions of metal cations with organic molecules in the gas phase, employing Fourier-transform ion-cyclotron resonance and guided-ion beam mass spectrometry. From 2000 to 2002, she was a Feodor-Lynen postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, working on hydrocarbon radical-rearrangement reactions on clean and modified metal surfaces. In 2002, she joined the late Prof. M. A. Reed’s Molecular Electronics group in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University as research associate to familiarize herself with the field of molecular electronics. From 2016-2023, she served as Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering and was named the Herbert G. Kayser Professor of Chemical Engineering at the City College of New York in 2019. Her research interests range from Janus and patchy particle preparation and the experimental and theoretical study of their molecular and field-directed assembly to their behavior at fluid/fluid and fluid/solid interfaces and application in directed delivery.
Nicole Hondow - University of Leeds
Nicole is an Associate Professor of Materials Characterisation. She is originally from Australia, where she completed her BSc(Hons) and PhD in Chemistry. Nicole joined Leeds initially as a postdoctoral research fellow, which she found far better than her PhD and was quite happy doing this until one day when Andy Brown asked her if she aimed to be an academic and she realised that is what she wanted… After a number of applications for various independent fellowships, Nicole successfully applied to be a University Academic Fellow, having been interviewed by the new Head of School (Elaine Martin) on her third day in the role. This conference will be just under 10 years since starting that role, and since then Nicole has spent much of her time talking to students (prospective university students, current undergraduates) and researchers (PhDs, postdocs, visitors, anyone who stands still for long enough…) about how much enjoyment comes from the electron microscopes in the basement and working with the people who keep them running.