We are pleased to introduce at CEST Dr. Olga Guselnikova, who is passionate about developing new functional materials (with a focus on light-responsive) for solving plastic waste issues.

Academic background

Dr. Olga got her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU, Russia) with a focus on organic synthesis, but in the last years of her master’s, she started to work in materials science. Later, Dr. Guselnikova received her PhD degree in chemistry from the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague, Czech Republic (Materials engineering) and TPU (Analytical chemistry) in 2019. In 2021, she became a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the National Institute for Materials Science (supervised by honored Prof. Yusuke Yamauchi), working on porous materials. Simultaneously, she worked distantly and TPU as a sub-group leader of “functional materials” direction.

Research focus

Her research interests are related to surface chemistry for functional materials. Dr. Olga uses this expertise in the development of optical sensing systems and catalysis. Her major contribution was in the field of plasmon-active materials for plasmon catalysis and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy coupled to neural network post-processing. During the last years of independent career, she focused on plastic waste upcycling technologies.

Today, she is a key part of our team with the focus on:

Plastic waste upcycling into added-value materials. Within the functional upcycling strategy, this research direction aims to repurpose waste plastics into materials with additional functions and value. In this case, the resulting material, such as a sorbent, catalyst, smart packaging, etc., provides a higher added value than the original polymer.

Plasmonic materials for sensing and catalysis: from fundamental to applied. Plasmons excited on noble metals (and some semiconductors) by light irradiation generate energy to run chemical reactions or enhance analytical signals. Understanding mechanistic processes and the discovery of new nanostructures approach the implementation of these materials in technology.

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