Meet the Team
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​Tom Penfold
ORCID: 0000-0003-4490-5672
Tom Penfold was appointed Lecturer in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at Newcastle University in September 2015. This followed a 2-year Research Scientist position within the SwissFEL project at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland. Tom's research focuses upon developing and exploiting methods for simulating and understanding excited state dynamics.

Further Information can be found here or at ResearchGate.
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Postdoctoral Researchers

Julien Eng (2017-Present)
ORCID: 0000-0002-7118-7242
Julien obtained his PhD in theoretical chemistry in 2015 at the Laboratoire de Chimie Quantique at the University of Strasbourg. He then spent a year as research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion studying spin dynamics of single molecule magnets. Since 2017, he has been a research associate at Newcastle University in the Penfold group. His current interests are the photoexcited mechanism of thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters and the photomagnetism of d metal complexes from both the quantum chemical and quantum dynamical perspectives.

Further Information can be found here

Thomas Pope  (2021-Present)
ORCID: 0000-0001-7552-9812
Tom obtained his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics in 2013 in the Lambert group at Lancaster University. Following this, he spent 18 months as a research assistant at the University of Catania studying quantum dynamics. In 2016, he moved to Newcastle University to develop a novel orbital-free density functional method to solid state calculations in the Hofer group. Since 2021, he has been a research associate in the Penfold group developing kinetic Monte-Carlo software.

Further Information can be found here
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Postgraduate Students

Leon Ashley (2024-Present)

Leon completed his MPhys in theoretical physics from Newcastle University in 2024. During his MPhys project, Leon studied correlations in bubble nucleation for an early universe simulator in a quantum field theory representation.  At the end of 2024, he joined the Penfold group as a PhD student. His research currently resides in determining the excited state structure of the intramolecular charge transfer of DMABN. The motivation of this is to develop methods for controlling the charge transfer character, which have applications in OLED devices.

Clelia Middleton (2021-Present)

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Past Group Members
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Tudur David ​(2022-2024) Postdoctoral Researcher
Sneha Verma (2022-2024) Postdoctoral Researcher​
Conor Rankine (2019-2022) Postdoctoral Researcher
Yvelin Giret (2018-2021) Postdoctoral Researcher
Thomas Northey (2016-2019) Postdoctoral Researcher
Theo Keane (2018-2019) Postdoctoral Researcher
 
​Shawana Ahmad (2020-2024) PhD Student
Miriam Fsadni (2019-2024) PhD Student
​Luke Watson (2020-2024) PhD Student
Yang Cao (2018-2022) PhD Student
Marwah Madkahli (2018-2022) PhD Student
​Beth Laidlaw (2017-2022) PhD Student
Emanuele Falbo (2018-2021) PhD Student
​Josh Littlefair (2016-2021) PhD Student
Jamie Gibson (2015-2019) PhD Student
​​Stuart Thompson (2015-2019) PhD Student

Julia Kaczmarek (2023 & 2024) MChem Project Student
Ellie Brown (2024) MChem Project Student
Adam O'Hare (2023) MChem Project Student
Oscar Ballantyne (2023) MChem Project Student
Esther May (2021) MChem Project Student
Alex Dodds (2021) MChem Project Student
​Joash Alonso (2017-2018) MChem Project Student
Joseph Duffield (2017-2018) MChem Project Student
Connor Shield (2017-2018) MChem Project Student
​Helen Duckworth (2015-2016) MChem Project Student
Beth Laidlaw (2016-2017) MChem Project Student
Jess Stacey (2016-2017) MChem Project Student

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Past Group Pictures

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