Beatrice Jones Wins Katharine Burr Blodgett Award for Outstanding PhD Research

Congratulations to Beatrice Jones who has been awarded the Katharine Burr Blodgett Award by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) Colloids Group. The prize is awarded annually for the best PhD thesis in colloid and interface science.

Bea successfully defended her thesis entitled Harnessing Light-Responsive Structural Control in Surfactant Assemblies in December 2024. In her thesis, Bea demonstrates that the diverse and dynamic behaviours displayed by surfactants in response to light can be harnessed for numerous applications, including drug delivery, gas control for microfluidic reactions, or solar energy storage.

Her thesis is available online via the University of Cambridge Repository.

The Award was announced last month at the annual meeting of the European Colloid and Interface Society, held in Bristol, where Bea presented her work in a contributed talk. The award is named in honour of Katharine Burr Blodgett, who was the first woman to receive a PhD degree in Physics from the University of Cambridge.

Bea is currently an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow in the Department, where she is developing photoswitchable DNA-based nanomaterials for biomedical applications.

We are proud to celebrate Bea’s achievements and look forward to the continued impact of her innovative research.