Simon JaquesDr Simon Jacques, Managing Director

Simon has 20 years experience in inventing and developing methods for materials characterisation. He is a world leader in creation of in situ methods, chemical imaging and software development for high throughput data processing. Following a BSc in biochemistry at Kings College, London, Simon obtained an MSc and PhD in pure and applied crystallography from Birkbeck College, London. He went on to obtain fellowships including the Robert Blair Fellowship in Applied Science and Technology, EPSRC Impact Acceleration Fellowship and positions at University College London, University of Manchester and Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire.

simon@finden.co.uk

Andy BealeProfessor Andrew Beale, Chief Scientific Officer

Andy is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, a group leader at the Research Complex at Harwell and an EPSRC Early Career Fellow. He is an accomplished researcher and specialist with 20 years experience in the application of spectroscopic and scattering methods for materials characterisation. Andy specialises in the development of in situ/operando time-resolved sampling methods, chemical imaging and materials design and development for application in heterogeneous catalysis. Expert areas are: the development of novel imaging techniques for the study of single catalyst bodies under real reaction conditions; determining the nature of the active site and reaction mechanism in catalysts for NOx abatement and methane activation; unravelling the self-assembly mechanism of microporous materials and the characterisation of catalytically active supported nanoparticles.

andy@finden.co.uk

Dr Stephen Price, Senior Scientist

Stephen joined Finden in October 2017 after spending 4 years working as a postdoc on beamline I18 (Microfocus Spectroscopy) at Diamond Light Source.  Prior to that, he obtained his PhD in the electrochemistry department at University of Southampton, followed by a postdoctoral position. Stephen has extensive experience in laboratory and synchrotron characterisation, covering a range of techniques including electron microscopy, XAS, XRD, and tomography, under in situ and operando conditions, and the development of data analysis methods to help interpret the data.  Whilst at Diamond, he developed a micro reactor to enable a combination of all of these techniques, “multimodal chemical tomography”, to be used to characterise industrial catalysts under operating conditions.   Stephen remains involved with academic collaborations, presenting lectures nationally and internationally, and has a H-index of 11 with 20+ publications. Stephen received a Faraday Institution Industrial Research Fellowship in 2021. He will be working in collaboration with the University of Sheffield on the FutureCat project to discover, develop and deploy the next generation of cathode materials to drive the transition towards electric vehicles, applying methods including XRD-CT to the new cathodes developed by the FutureCat project.  Read more at  https://futurecat.ac.uk/team/stephen-price/

stephen@finden.co.uk

Dr Antony Vamvakeros, Research & Development Lead Scientist

Antony is the Research and Development Lead Scientist, working on the development of new algorithms and deep learning approaches for processing and analysis of tomography, scattering and spectroscopy data. His research focuses on advancing and applying chemical imaging techniques to study solid heterogeneous catalysts, fuel cells and batteries under operating conditions. Antony graduated with a Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the University of Patras before moving to the United Kingdom where he obtained an MSc in Chemical Process Engineering and a PhD in Chemistry from University College London. He then spent two years at the ESRF working as an industrial post-doctoral scientist at beamline ID15A developing X-ray diffraction computed tomography (XRD-CT) and nDTomo, a graphical user interface (GUI) software suite for handling chemical imaging and tomography data. Antony currently holds a prestigious 4 year Royal Society Industry Fellowship working in collaboration with the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London to develop cutting-edge deep learning approaches to accelerate chemical imaging and tomography methods.

antony@finden.co.uk

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Dr Yaro Odarchenko, Research Scientist

Before moving to Finden in 2020 Yaro was working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University College London. He has a proven expertise in solving multidisciplinary tasks by applying deep theoretical understanding and 10 years’ of practical experience in designing, building and testing new experimental platforms for the advanced energy and functional materials characterisation with the help of laboratory and synchrotron X-ray radiation. He is currently a Visiting Scientist at surface/interface analysis beamline I07 at Diamond Light Source. Yaro holds a PhD in Materials Chemistry from Strasbourg University and MSc in Applied Physics from MIPT. Whilst working in an international environment of the top universities and national labs across Europe and the USA, he has successfully accomplished multiple projects with industry partners from the DOW Chemical, DSM Resolve, Total, BP and Johnson Matthey. Recently Yaro also took part in the development of a new type of Li-ion battery anode in partnership with the Cambridge University and Johnson Matthey Plc that was funded by the Innovate UK as a part of the ‘Faraday Challenge’ Industrial Strategy.

yaro@finden.co.uk

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Dr Wilm Jones, Research Scientist

Wilm received his PhD from Cardiff University under the supervision of professor Michael Bowker in 2016. His project concerned photocatalytic hydrogen production using supported gold and gold alloy Nano-particles. After this Wilm was employed by Cardiff University as a research assistant based full time in Research complex at Harwell working on CO2 hydrogenation. This was followed by a positions as a research fellow as Aberdeen University on a project concerning photocatalytic NADH regeneration and as a research associate for UCL at RCaH on a project developing photocatalytic materials for the depollution of air. Currently Wilm is working for Finden investigating novel DeNOx catalyst.

wilm@finden.co.uk

Evangelos Papoutsellis photo

Dr Evangelos Papoutsellis, Senior Research Scientist

Evangelos Papoutsellis joined Finden in October 2022 as a Senior Research Scientist. His research focuses on mathematical optimisation for inverse imaging problems in particular model based and deep learning methods in tomography. He received a 5-year Diploma degree from the School of Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, in 2010. He continued his studies at the University of Cambridge, PartIII of the Mathematical Tripos (2011) and PhD in Mathematical Image Processing (2015). In the next three years, he worked as PostDoctoral Researcher in the University of Orleans and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tours in France. He moved back to the UK as a Research Associate at the University of Manchester and as a Computational Imaging Scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council. He is one of the main developers of the Core Imaging Library (CIL) for the Collaborative Computational Project in Tomography Imaging (CCPi).

evangelos@finden.co.uk

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Hongyang Dong, Research Scientist

Hongyang completed a PhD in the chemistry department of UCL. His knowledge background includes Msc Scientific Computing and Bsc Physics degrees from UCL. He has taken part in many computing and spectroscopic related projects like “Developing an intelligent chemical reaction generator”, “Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) on fluorescence analyzing ”, and he also did some internships about the research of the Quadrotor UAV Flight Attitude Control System. Hongyang’s PhD project focussed on applying AI and machine learning techniques on high throughput analysis of chemical imaging data. His skills include many computing languages (Python, C++, java, C, R), high performance computing skills, and machine learning techniques.

Antonia Bobitan photo

Antonia Bobitan, PhD Student

Antonia is a first-year PhD student in chemistry at University College London, where she also obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees (with distinction). She has focused her interests on inorganic chemistry, materials science and catalysis; her research builds on these areas of interest, working on X-ray-based characterization techniques and data analysis for heterogeneous catalysts. Her skills include a wide range of laboratory and synchrotron characterization techniques such as diffraction, tomography, fluorescence, spectroscopy, electron microscopy, but also programming and machine learning techniques for data analysis. She is currently working on the Horizon Europe-funded STORMING project, which aims to develop a methane pyrolysis catalyst that will selectively produce carbon nanotubes, alongside CO2-free H2. She will provide the characterisation and multimodal in situ/operando imaging of these catalysts, along with the development of new machine learning techniques to analyse the large volume of data obtained.

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