ANR CDeePL Kick-Off meeting

At the beginning of February, more precisely on the 2nd, some members of our group in Lyon, including Margarida and Agílio, went to Dunkirk for the first meeting of the ANR CDeePL project.

The main goal is to prepare biocompatible porous liquids based on deep eutectic solvents and CD-MOFs to increase the solubility and bioavailability of active ingredients.

This project involves several collaborating laboratories and is led by researcher Dr Sophie Fourmentin of UCEIV in collaboration with three partners: Unistra, CMC UMR 7140 – Dr S. Baudron; Paris-Saclay, IGPS UMR 8612 – Dr F.-X. Legrand; and ENS-Lyon, LCH UMR 5182 – Dr M. Costa Gomes.

Furthermore, each group presented some of their specialities and contributions to the project, and we had a super productive day. We hope this project bears fruit!

In the image are those present (from left to right): Dr Miriana Kfoury – ULCO, Dr David Landy -ULCO, Dr Margarida Costa Gomes – ENS Lyon, Dr Vincent Faivre – Paris Saclay, Steven Ruellan – ULCO, Dr François-Xavier Legrand – Paris Saclay, Dr Sophie Fourmentin – ULCO, Dr Agilio Padua – ENS Lyon, Dr Nithavong Cam – ENS Lyon, Dr Stéphane Baudron – Unistra, Dr Cintia M. Correa, ENS Lyon, and Pauline André – Unistra.

Benjamin Abécassis’ talk about SAXS and WAXS

Last Tuesday, Benjamin Abécassis (CNRS research director – ENS Lyon) offered us a class on the fundamentals of SAXS and WAXS.

Thank you again for accepting our invitation and enlightening our thoughts about the technique.

Furthermore, our collaborator Guillaume was responsible for the breakfast with croissants, pains au chocolat and chouquettes.

Katya defended her PhD

Katya Goloviznina defended her PhD brilliantly in front of a jury composed of Ed Maginn (Notre Dame, USA), Céline Merlet (CNRS, Toulouse), Paul Madden (Oxford, UK) and Luca Monticelli (INSERM, Lyon). Katya is the first PhD of those who started in the group at ENS Lyon.

Margarida, Luca, Agilio, Katya, Céline

Group photo Sept 2021

Photo in the Monod gardens after a group picnic: Eduards, Agilio, Katya, Margarida, Federica, Hanne, Adriaan, Mirella, Inês, Guillaume, Jocasta, Daniel, Nicolas, Salvador

Pizza outside

Pizza outside the lab: Katya, Guillaume D, Hanne, Mirella, Daniel, Luke, Agilio, Adriaan, Eduards, Jocasta, Layla, Inês, Guillaume S, Margarida

On a not so sunny day… thanks to Guillaume S!

Group picnic

A group picnic at the end of confinement, Spring 2021

Group picnic, Parc de Gerland: Margarida, Daniel, Ryan, Adriaan, Inês, Jocasta, Agílio, Guillaume, Katya, Luke, Nicolas.

Group photo Sep 2019

Mark (visiting from TU Eindhoven), Agilio, Adrea Mele (visiting from Politecnico Milano), Zheng, Margarida, Jocasta, Pablo, Laura, Fernando, Simon, Sachini, Katya

Paper on SAILs in Nature Materials

In a recent article in Nature Materials, from a collaboration with MIT (USA), Bristol (UK) and Perth (Australia) we describe the discovery of a new class of electrolytes, which can improve energy storage efficiency in supercapacitors. These detergent-like ionic liquids can self-assemble into sandwich-like bilayer structures on electrode surfaces. And that is very reason why they give better energy storage performance.

Check the manuscript at Nat. Mat. (2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0449-6

SAILS (Surface Active Ionic Liquids) self-assemble in bilayer structures at electrode interfaces (right) while simpler ionic liquids form alternating-charge layers.