Materials Design Graduate Research Prize

Prize awared to Gabriel Lau

The Materials Design Graduate Research Prize for 2013 is awarded to Gabriel Lau.

Over the last year, Gabriel has developed into a quietly confident researcher. His work has always been of a high standard, recently, however, he has showed increased independence, originality of thought and confidence in his own work and opinion. One of the most interesting findings of his project to date has been to challenge the accepted views of his supervisors. Previously Jackson and Muller had assigned the fluctuation terms in the thermodynamics of nanoscale drops to being entropic in nature. Gabriel worked out the mathematics behind the perturbation scheme and recognized a more complex interplay of energy and entropy to be responsible for the poor statistics associated with the test area method. Gabriel’s project covers multiple length scales: he is calculating the free energies of clusters of just a few water and sulphuric acid molecules using molecular dynamics techniques in order to assess cluster stability on a finer grained level, in addition to carrying out quantum chemical calculations to investigate H-bonding and structural motifs that exist in systems where there are no “bulk” water molecules. To apply and understand the complexities associated with all of these length scales and to interact effectively with his four supervisors shows that Gabriel is very versatile and flexible. Moreover, part of this work was presented by him as a poster in the Thermodynamics 2013 conference, an international biannual conference focussing on the fundamentals and applications of thermodynamics. His posterinterfacial tension of water nano droplets received the best poster award, chosen from around 200 entries.