Before starting my PhD at Cambridge, I did my B.S. in Chemistry at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China. I worked on the fabrication and characterization of quartz nanopipette to mimic and understand the ion transport of the potassium pump using electrochemistry. This allowed me to simultaneously obtain a correlation between current and pipette pore size, which is used to increase the resolution and robustness of the Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy for non-contact bioimaging.
Having learnt how powerful electrochemistry is, I started my PhD at Zhang group in 2020, where electrochemistry is used extensively to understand fundamental processes and is coupled with many other inspiring technologies to help to build a future with sustainable energy conversion approaches. At Cambridge, I'm working on boosting the efficiency of photosynthetic cells/electrode biohybrid systems. Specifically, my work focuses on understanding what is limiting the electrode performance in a bio-electrode hybrid and applying that knowledge to design the next-generation electrode. To this end, whilst a variety of structural factors and material factors play a role, I focus on using additive manufacturing methods for fast prototype manufacture and on developing a bio-photoelectrochemical platform for fast screening. This design-fabrication-screen iteration is expected to find high-performing electrodes for biophotoelectrochemical applications and has many insights to offer in other fields where electrode design is critical.