The Group
The Cooke Group is an ever adapting, motivated group of researchers from Masters students at the beginning of their careers to Postdocs with years of experience. You will find who makes up the group below.
Graeme Cooke
Postdocs
Dr Dylan Wilkinson
Dylan is currently working on the development of Polymers of Intrinsic Microporosity (PIMs) for optoelectronic applications in collaboration with Neil McKeown (Edinburgh) and Ifor Samuel (St Andrews). Prior to his current position, Dylan completed a PhD in the group in 2021, developing organic cathode materials for Lithium and Sodium ion batteries. This was followed by a short Post Doc working on hole and electron transport materials for perovskite solar cells. Dylan completed a BSc Chemistry at the University of Glasgow in 2017 which included a research project synthesising bay quinones under the supervision of Dr Goetz Bucher.
PhD Students
Fraces Tracey
Frances Tracey has recently completed her PhD on the synthesis of organic materials for optoelectronic applications. Prior to this Frances completed her one year Research Masters, also in the Cooke group, working on Spiro-OMeTAD based derivatives to act as hole transporting materials in perovskite solar cells. She completed an MSci in Chemistry at the University of Glasgow in 2018 with an industrial placement at Charles River Laboratories working as an analytical chemist.
Lewis Mackenzie
Lewis graduated with a BSc in chemistry from the University of Glasgow in 2019. In his final year project he worked as part of the Cooke group synthesising dyes for bulk heterojunction organic solar cells. Lewis then worked as an analytical chemist at Charles River Laboratories for a year before returning to the Cooke group to start his PhD in 2020. Lewis is currently working on the synthesis of organic charge transport materials for perovskite solar cells.
Ben Vella
Ben is a final year PhD student under the joint supervision of Dr Pablo Docampo, researching doping mechanisms of novel hole transport materials for perovskite solar cells.
Abdul-wasir Shaka
Abdul-Wasir is a PhD student in the Cooke group. He did his undergraduate and masters degrees at Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria. He is presently working on making Hole Transport Materials (HTMs) that can self-assemble on perovskite surface acting to passivate them and improve their stability in solar cells. Aside this, he is working on improving the pattern of arrangement of SOT-OH, a derivative of Spiro-OMeTAD made by the group, by incorporating hydrogen bonding groups forcing the compound’s molecules to aggregate in a certain pattern hoping to improve its consistency and film forming ability when spin coated.
Wai Kin Yiu (Cyrus)
Cyrus is a third year PhD student under joint supervision with Dr Pablo Docampo, researching novel materials in the device fabrication of perovskite solar cells.
Abarna Sekar
Abarna is a third year PhD student developing novel self-assemble monolayer materials for solar cell application.
Gregor MacLeod
Gregor is a second year PhD student developing novel organic polymers as additives and dopants to enhance performance of hole transport materials in perovskite solar cells.
Masters & Undergraduate Students
Pablo Santana Alvaro
Pablo is carrying out an MRes project in the group. Pablo is researching the eletropolymerisation of carbazole and edot materials for use as hole-transport materials for solar cell application