Group Leader

Dr Felix Plasser
Felix completed his PhD in 2012 in Vienna with Prof. Hans Lischka. Subsequently, he spent two years in Heidelberg with Prof. Andreas Dreuw. He returned to Vienna in 2015 for his second postdoc with Prof. Leticia González. In 2018 he was appointed as Lecturer in Physical and Computational Chemistry at Loughborough University.
PhD Students

Patrick Kimber
Patrick obtained his MChem with 1st class honours from the University of Sheffield in June 2019. His masters project, supervised by Dr Natalia Martsinovich, aimed to elucidate the molecular structure of the self-assembled network of hexaaminotriphenylene (HATP) on the Ag(111) surface using density functional theory calculations.
Project: Unravelling the electronic structure properties of functional molecules.
MChem/MSc Students

Josiah Riley
Josiah is currently looking into the asymmetric alkylation of indoles with diazoesters, considering Pd-catalysis with Bipyridine-N,N’-Dioxides as a feasible method.
Project: Computational Analysis of Pd-catalysed reactions.

Luke Russell
Luke grew up in Northamptonshire, he is concluding the final year of his MChem in Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. After spending a year out working for an FMCG company within chemical and microbiological quality control, Luke has returned to Loughborough to complete a masters research project under the supervision of Dr. Butler. The project focuses on the determination of antenna triplet state energies using computational quantum chemistry. This is done in effort to predict, and optimise, structures capable of enabling the sensitization luminescence lanthanide-centred probes for turn-on emission.
Project: Computational Optimisation of Antenna Triplet State Energy for lanthanide probes.
Joint supervision with Dr. Stephen Butler

Issie Watt
Project: Detailed insight into excited-state electronic wavefunctions.
Previous Members
Tianhui Yu MSc
Project: Computational Investigation of Aromaticity in Macrocycles.
Dylan Morgan MChem
Project: Visualisation of aromaticity in macrocycles.
View his computer code on github
Hamid Matari MSc
Project: Computational modelling of the synthesis of the antibiotic basidalin.
Xinyi Wang MSc
Project: Modelling of anion binding to Europium complexes.
Kathryn M. Stell MChem
Project: Computational investigation of the electronic structure of aggregation induced emitters.
Lewis E. Freeman MChem
Project: Photodynamics simulations of nucleobase analogues.
Rhys Francis MSc
Joint Masters’ supervision with Dr. Stephen Butler
Previous Mentees
Dr Maximillian F. S. J. Menger
Supervisors: Prof. B. Mennucci (Pisa), Prof. L. González (Vienna)
Dr Stefanie A. Mewes
Supervisor: Prof. A. Dreuw (Heidelberg)