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We are pleased to announce that Monika Jurcic (Supervisor: Prof. Ivan Parkin) won the Rothwell Prize for best poster presentation in the department 2016. Monika is pictured above with the organiser, Prof. Gopinathan Sankar.

Monika Jurcic obtained a First Class (hons) Master of Chemistry degree from the University of Bath in 2013, after which, she joined ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº as part of the Jill Dando institute's Security Science doctoral training centre, where she completed a Master of Research in 2014.

She is currently a second year PhD student hosted within the department of Chemistry where she is pursuing her research into the use of fluorescent metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for the trace detection of explosives.

The scope for this research arises from the increase in explosives attacks in recent years, thus there is a need for further developments into detection methods that successfully identify explosives or explosive related materials on a person, surface or vapour.

The aim of the project is to probe the use of metal-organic frameworks as sensing materials for the detection of trace quantities of explosive vapours and solutions containing explosives.

Metal-organic frameworks are a relatively novel class of porous and crystalline materials that have shown promise as sensing materials owing to their high porosity and surface area, tailorable surface/pore chemistries, easy and timely synthesis, high thermal stability, amongst others. This project envisages building a sensory array of a number of metal-organic frameworks, for the potential construction of a novel and portable explosives detection platform.