Colm Delaney Assistant Professor

AMBER Associated Investigator

Colm is Assistant Professor of Inorganic and Materials Chemistry at the University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin. He is an emerging leader in the field of sensing, bio-diagnostics, microfluidics, and materials development. After completing his PhD in 2016 in Trinity College Dublin, under the supervision of Prof. Sylvia Draper, he took a Postdoctoral role at Dublin City University. During this time, he served as scientific coordinator of an FP7 Project, lead researcher and co-applicant on a Technology Innovation Development Award (TIDA) and directed a research project in conjunction with Air-Force Research Laboratories (USA) and GE Global Research. From December 2018 he led a research group at University College Dublin. In October 2020 he returned to TCD upon receiving a 2-year Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship entitled ‘Bio-Inspired Photonic Sensors’. In 2021, Colm was awarded a MSCA International Fellowship at University of Cambridge. In 2022, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the School of Chemistry, TCD and received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant to establish his own research group in the School of Chemistry and AMBER Centre, Trinity College Dublin.

Colm’s research draws on inspiration from natural systems that have perfected the ability to morph their colour, visibility, and reflectivity, to camouflage, signal, mimic, distract, and regulate biological processes. The group will use this approach to generate structural colours, multiple band-gap materials, invisible patterns upon polarisation, angle (in)dependent colours, and optical stimuli-responsive behaviour that can compete with natural systems. They advance these models to demonstrate wireless manipulation using light, heat, or vapour, camouflaging and encryption, and the ability to monitor, sense, and diagnose by discriminative optical sensing in gaseous and liquid states.