ERC Starting Grant for Dr Dan Congrave

Congratulations to Dr Dan Congrave, who is among eleven researchers at the University of Oxford to be awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).  With funding totalling 761 million Euros, these grants support excellent research across a diverse range of fields and are intended to enable early-career researchers to pursue their most promising ideas.  

Dr Congrave’s research exploits original structural organic chemistry to design and synthesise new materials that are unprecedented in the way they absorb and emit light. The absorption and emission of light by organic molecules has broad ramifications across technologies, from cellular imaging in medicine, to the pixels in mobile phone displays. 

The current state-of-the-art organic materials, superluminophores, display intense absorption and fast emission, but achieve this through a requirement for aggregation, where multiple molecules must coherently assemble together. This self-assembly is extremely difficult to predict and control, which restricts applications and detailed understanding.

This ERC Starting Grant aims to pioneer Discreet Organic Superluminophores (DISCOS) as a new class of molecules that will circumvent any reliance on self-assembly, challenging long accepted views on how efficiently organic dyes can absorb and emit light, and serving as new tools to tackle a range of important longstanding research problems across traditional scientific boundaries.

Dr Congrave said:  If we can create colour-tunable emitters that deliver superluminophore-level performance without requiring aggregation, the implications for organic electronics and photonics will be transformative.  DISCOS is designed to deliver the fundamental design rules and demonstrator materials that show this is possible.  He added: It’s extremely exciting to have my research ideas validated through this ERC Starting Grant, which will provide amazing support to grow my group through pursuing exciting blue-sky science. A special thanks goes to the ERC reviewers and panel for their constructive feedback, and my mentors, colleagues and collaborators for their support and insight throughout my ongoing research journey.

A solution of a prototype DISCOS molecule glowing when excited with UV light. Photo by Eleanor Hollingsworth.

You can read more, including about the other Oxford recipients, here.