Asel Sartbaeva
I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow in Chemistry at the University of Bath. I received my MSc degree at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in 1999, and MPhil and PhD degrees at the University of Cambridge in 2002 and 2005. I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Physics in ASU from 2005 till 2007. In 2007, I was awarded a Samuel and Violet Glasstone Fellowship, and have moved to the Department of Chemistry in Oxford. I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2010, which I took up in January 2011 on returning from the maternity leave. In 2012, I moved to the University of Bath to start my own research group. I now have an active group with 4 PhD and 4 Masters students working with me on projects related to functional materials. We focus on synthesis of functional porous materials, encapsulation of nanomaterials, thermal stability of biological substances and surface chemistry.
Antony Nearchou
I'm Antony and I'm in the 3rd year of my PhD at the University of Bath. I did my undergraduate Masters degree in Chemistry at Bath, which included a year placement at Intrinsiq Materials in Farnborough. I spent my Masters research project was investigating the role of cations in the synthesis of zeolite RHO under Asel's supervision. Upon graduating in 2014, I decided to return to Bath in 2015 to study this area further. My research focuses on understanding the interplay between cations and organic structure directing agents to assemble specific zeolite frameworks. My other interests include nanoporous materials, functional materials and applications in catalysis, adsorption and separation.
Find me on twitter: https://twitter.com/nearchow​
Aswin Doekhie
I am a PhD student with the Sartbeava group. I received my BSc from the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in 2011, MSc from Cardiff Metropolitan University in 2014 and have worked in industry between studies. My experience is related to virology and vaccine development during internships and industrial jobs in the Netherlands and UK. I am working on the ensilication of vaccines project since September 2015 where I combine my industrial experience with chemical methods and characterisation of materials to help improve global health.
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Ayla Wahid
Ayla joined the group in October 2016. She is a biochemistry PhD student supervised by Prof. Jean van den Elsen and Dr. Asel Sartbaeva. She received a BSc (Hons) Biology degree with Professional Placement from the University of Bath in 2015 and then a Masters of Research in Biosciences in 2016. Ayla has a keen interest in infection and immunology and is working on developing a more efficacious and thermostable tuberculosis vaccine utilising a novel adjuvant and ensilication respectively.
Mero-Lee Cornelius
I am a visiting research scholar from the University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa where I am currently enrolled as a PhD student. I obtained both my MSc (Chemistry) degree (thesis titled: “The role of aluminium content in the control of the morphology of fly ash based hierarchical zeolite X.”) and BSc (Honours) Chemistry degree (mini-thesis titled: “Conversion of oxygenates, produced from a high temperature Fischer-Tropsch process, to hydrocarbons over a zeolite catalyst.”) from the University of the Western Cape. I obtained my undergraduate BSc (Chemical Biology) degree from Stellenbosch University in Western Cape, South Africa. My current research focuses on the valorisationof South African coal fly ash through the extraction of useful minerals and the subsequent utilisation of extracted minerals in the hydrothermal synthesis of zeolites. The research project particularly focuses on the synthesis of high-silica zeolites from a coal fly ash silicon precursor. The high thermal stability and solid acidity of high-silica zeolites have made them favourablematerials for application in catalysis and adsorption.Other research areas include geometric modelling of zeolite frameworks using GASP software.
Matt Slade
I joined the group in October of 2017 as the beginning of my PhD studies. I previously obtained my undergraduate degree at Plymouth University in summer 2017, with additional focus on analytical chemistry and a final year research project on synthetic organo-metallic chemistry, supervised by Dr Antony Lewis.
At the University of Bath, I work on furthering the work already undertaken in the group on the stabilisation of vaccines through ensilication.
In particular I am looking at upscaling this method, currently focusing on thermally stabilising bacterial viruses.
Lisa Price
I graduated with a Masters in Chemistry from the University of Bath, where I first joined the Sartbaeva group for a final year research project on synthesis, ion exchange and structural characterisation of Zeolite A. In February 2018, I re-joined the group as a first year PhD student to work on the design and synthesis of novel zeolites using both theoretical and experimental methods.
