The Team

Prahlad joined Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow, working on the PATCH project — Plasmonic Nanoparticle Enhanced CuO/BiVO₄ Heterojunctions for Photoelectrocatalytic Pollutant Degradation. The project sits right at the crossroad of two things I care about: laser-based nanoparticle synthesis and photoelectrocatalysis for a cleaner environment.

I have the pleasure of co-supervising Prahlad on this project, together with Prof. David Amans, who leads the laser ablation setup at the Institut Lumière Matière and is the project's scientific supervisor.

Want to know more? Visit the PATCH project page for the full objectives, work packages, and updates.

David is co-leader of the Luminescence team and leads the pulsed laser ablation in liquid (PLAL) setup at the Institut Lumière Matière, and it's under his supervision that I've done most of my laser ablation work — from the shockwave dynamics studied during my PhD to the nanoparticle synthesis work happening now. His expertise spans laser ablation, plasma physics, luminescence, and physical chemistry of nanomaterials. He's also the scientific supervisor of the PATCH project below.

Gilles is co-leader of the Luminescence team at the Institut Lumière Matière. His work centers on the light-matter interaction mechanisms behind luminescence, from nanostructures to bulk crystals, and on how physico-chemical properties can be tuned to control optical behaviour. I've had the chance to work with him on laser-synthesized nanoparticles, including a project where we doped nanoparticles in situ during laser ablation — using his expertise in luminescence to actually measure how well the doping worked.