Group Leader
Dr. Parton completed his undergraduate studies in Natural Sciences (Physics and Physical Chemistry) at University College London (UCL) and the California Institute of Technology, winning the MAPS Faculty Medal (2015). He obtained a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge, funded through the NanoDTC MRes+PhD program. He was awarded the ACS CELL Division Graduate Student Award (2023) and an MRS Silver Medal (2022). Following this, he was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. He has been a Group Leader at Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces since September 2023 as well as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow since May 2024.
My current research interests relate to three interconnected themes:
- Self-assembly and dis-assembly: how nanoscale building blocks can be induced to spontaneously form materials with emergent properties and behaviour.
- Chirality transfer: how the breaking of mirror symmetry at one scale (e.g. stereoisomerism of molecules) determines the properties of larger-scale structures.
- Optics: using light, especially visible light, to characterise and control soft matter systems.
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