The PE-CDT Annual Symposium is a highlight of our students' year and 2019's event was no different!

The PE-CDT Annual Symposium is a highlight of our students' year and this year was no different as we heard the excellent research from Cohort 8, stories from our alumni, talks by our distinguished external invited speakers and posters from all other cohorts.

During the morning sessions we heard from Prof Antoine Kahn, of Princeton University who joined us to talk about the electronic structure of metal halide perovsite 3D and 2D surfaces and welcomed back Dr Gwen Wyatt-Moon a Cohort 5 alumni now at the University of Cambridge. Gwen discussed her journey from engineering to physics and how she has returned to her natural "engineering" habitat.

After lunch and a superb poster session, there was a fascinating talk by Prof Lisa Hall of the University of Cambridge on proteins for affordable diagnostics in low resource countries and we concluded the day with another alumni - this time Dr Jameel Marafie, also from Cohort 5, who has started his own technology company: Headlight AI. Interspersed with these talks were late stage review talks from Cohort 8, and the standard this year was exceptional. We also squeezed in a flash poster presentation session featuring a selection of our poster presentations.

Antoine Kahn, of the University of Princeton, said:

"The whole day was extremely interesting. I was much impressed by the maturity of your graduate students and the quality of the talks and posters.  They showed top notch research and I was very pleased to participate."

The drinks and networking session at the end of the day featured prize giving for best talks and posters of the day. Winners:

• Audience Choice for Best Flash Poster Presentation: Helen Bristow
• Audience Choice for Best Poster: Shenyang Chen
• Runner up Best Poster: Ryley Ratnasingham
• Best Poster: Luis Lanzetta Lopez
• Runner up Best Talk: Panagiota Kafourou
• Best Talk: Sam Hillman