Ineta Grikalaite

In September 2018, I started my PhD with EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Metamaterials (XM2) at the University of Exeter with supervisors Dr Ana Neves and Dr Anna Baldycheva. My PhD project is titled: Terahertz photonic metadevices with carbon nanomaterials. Our goal is to fabricate metasurfaces based on multilayer graphene films on flexible substrates for manipulating terahertz radiation. This includes developing a production method for multilayer graphene films of controlled thickness, optimisation of multilayer graphene film transfer onto target substrates and engineering metasurfaces by means of photolithography.

I graduated with a Masters degree in Chemistry from the University of St Andrews. As a part of my degree I spent a year on industrial placement at Midatech Pharma, which is a company that focuses on development of therapeutics for oncology by utilising ultra-small gold nanoparticles as drug carriers. My role within the team was to support the research by developing gold nanoparticles that allow tracking of the ligand shell before and after it is released in both vitro and vivo experiments primarily using fluorophores as ligands. My Masters project was the development of a simple method to produce highly reduced graphene oxide using a novel reducing agent and consequently to improve one of the best chemical reduction methods in the literature, where graphene oxide is reduced using Lawesson’s reagent.