Claire Hobday

The Hobday Group at the University of Edinburgh School of Chemistry is offering a PhD project on solid-state refrigerants, materials that can pump heat when squeezed and may provide alternatives to harmful refrigerant gases. The research will investigate why some materials show excellent solid-state refrigeration performance. The successful student will map the energetic pathways and molecular dynamics that control how these materials respond to pressure, building an understanding from the atomic scale upward. The project combines computational chemistry, high-pressure crystallography and calorimetry. The balance between computation and experiment can be tailored to the successful candidate, providing an interdisciplinary research environment spanning molecular modelling, structural characterization and thermal measurements within the Hobday Group. The work addresses sustainable approaches to heating and cooling buildings and food while advancing fundamental understanding of pressure-responsive materials.