Dan Congrave

Funding is currently available for DPhil students and postdoctoral researchers – please e-mail Dan Congrave with expressions of interest.

Considering that all life on Earth ultimately relies on the interaction of carbon-based organic matter with light through photosynthesis, it is unsurprising that organic molecules which absorb and emit light broadly overarch traditional scientific disciplines, with great implications in modern technologies related to electronics, energy, sensing and bioscience. Our research is very interdisciplinary and holistic, combining target-driven organic synthesis with physical and computational chemistry. If you enjoy synthetic organic and physical chemistry and are not sure what research topic ties them together, this is a group for you! The aim is to take longstanding applied research problems and distil them down to the fundamental level, at which point we will typically notice that a molecule is required with a specific combination of photophysical properties that no one has been able to achieve yet. Our research is all about exploiting original structural organic chemistry to design and synthesise new materials that are unprecedented in the way in which they absorb and emit light, with the goal of making an impact on modern technologies such as solar cells, displays, electronics and quantum information.

Examples of our targets include organic molecules that:

• Have near-infrared bandgaps and can emit light efficiently.
• Efficiently emit blue light and can strongly absorb
• Efficiently emit light and efficiently transport charges.
• Have high spin ground states and can emit light efficiently.

Representative papers

• Adv. Mater. 2025, 37, 2501164. (doi.org/10.1002/adma.202501164)
• Nature Materials 2024, 23, 519–526. (doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01812-4)
• J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2024, 146, 32, 22612–22621. (doi.org/10.1021/jacs.4c07004)
• J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023, 145, 6, 3507–3514. (doi.org/10.1021/jacs.2c12008)
• J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, 10, 6306–6313. (doi.org/10.1039/D2TC00460G)
• J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2019, 141, 18390–18394. (doi.org/10.1021/jacs.9b09323)