IRTG Annual Meeting – Melbourne 2025:

On February 17, the OPTEXC Annual Meeting 2025 took off at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Under clear blue skies our IRTG PIs, Early Career Researchers and guests from the University of Bayreuth, the University of Melbourne and Monash University came together to connect and exchange the latest OPTEXC results. After official addresses from university representatives and the IRTG spokespersons Anna Köhler, Paul Maulvaney and Chris McNeill, participants enjoyed an insightful methods tutorial and engaging presentations by OPTEXC PIs and ERCs alike. Networking continued over drinks at the Yarra River…

Day 2 of the OPTEXC Annual Meeting saw a captivating invited keynote by Paul Shaw from the University of Queensland, promising progress presentations by doctoral researchers from IRTG projects P01 „Controlling decoherence in the singlet fission process“ and P03 „Controlling exciton delocalization by shear-induced alignment“, and a lab tour at the University of Melbourne.

For the second leg of the OPTEXC Annual Meeting, our consortium changed sites to Monash University to continue the discussion of intriguing PhD progress reports and enjoy engaging guest lectures by Johannes C. Brendel, Wallace Wong, Nikhil Medhekar, and James Hutchison. Also at Monash, our group was delighted to visit excellent research facilities during a lab tour that also included extended stops at the Australian Synchrotron from the McNeill working group and the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication, MCN. To top off this truly enriching IRTG meeting in true Australian fashion, our local IRTG speakers and hosts Chris McNeill and Paul Mulvaney themselves took great care of feeding all OPTEXC researchers at the closing BBQ.