Governing Body Fellow
Bart de Nijs is a postdoctoral researcher in the NanoPhotonics Centre of the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the behaviour of light, electrons, and molecules on length-scales of several nanometres and below. Bart is exploring how the unique properties observed in metal nano-architectures can be harnessed for practical applications, such as sensing for early-stage diagnosis of diseases, photon harvesting and catalysis.
He is also involved as a scientific coordinator in a large collaborative project called ‘Nano-Optics to Nano-Chemistry’ (NOtCH), in which experimental physicists, theoretical physicists and chemists from inside and outside the UK collaborate with the aim to optically control chemistry on the nanoscale.
Bart completed his PhD in the area of nanoparticle self-assembly, in the group of Alfons van Blaaderen at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. For this work he studied entropy driven self-assembly of nanoparticles/colloids in spherical confinement, and demonstrated how five-fold symmetries such as icosahedra, as observed in nature, is favoured by entropy.
