The Group
I did my PhD with James Durrant at Imperial College London, using transient diffuse reflectance spectroscopy to understand how 'photocatalyst sheet' Z-scheme water-splitting devices work — which earned me the Imperial College Chemistry PhD Prize in 2020. From there I switched to electrocatalysis, working with Ifan Stephens (2021-2023) on in-situ spectroscopies for measuring binding energies in amorphous inorganic electrocatalysts. That work led to a Schmidt AI in Sciences Fellowship with Aron Walsh (2023-2024), where I applied unsupervised learning to spectroelectrochemical data, and then a Lindemann Fellowship at Caltech's High Throughput Experimentation Lab (2024-2026), where I built the first high-throughput operando spectroelectrochemical instrument. In 2026 I joined UCL as a lecturer. I love science because you never get what you expect: there is always room to create something new or go in a new direction. Outside of work, I'm super into rock climbing and hiking.
Kai-Chun Chang (Gino)
Visiting Master's Student
I'm Gino, from Taiwan — a small but beautiful island. I'm a master's student working on perovskite photodetectors, visiting Ben's lab to learn coding and instrument automation, and with them the concept of building a complete system - I sucessfully designed a JV curve measurment for photovoltaics! Outside the lab, my passion is photography, and I love exploring — from climbing mountain peaks to diving into the ocean. To me, life is an adventure, and what matters most in research is not the skills you learn, but the way you think.
The ASEM lab has recently moved to the Department of Chemistry at UCL. We are building the group and actively recruiting. See the open positions page for details!
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