Goldys was Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics and now leads a nanoscale biophotonics group in Biomedical Engineering. The programme is about extracting diagnostic information from very weak optical signals inside cells and tissue: luminescent and upconverting nanoparticle probes with long lifetimes that allow time-gated, background-free detection; hyperspectral unmixing of native cellular autofluorescence (NADH, FAD, porphyrins) as a completely label-free readout of cell state, which she has pushed toward clinical use in reproductive medicine and cancer; and nanoparticle-mediated therapy. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — time-gated luminescence and NV relaxometry are two solutions to the same problem — how to read a faint, specific signal out of an autofluorescent, optically hostile biological background — and her clinical translation experience is exactly the missing capability in most quantum-biosensing groups. Preferred attribute present: advanced/label-based imaging with a genuine human-application pathway.
Winpenny holds the Regius Chair in Chemistry at Manchester and is a world leader in molecular magnetism and molecular nanomagnets for quantum technologies. Research directions: (1) Molecular nanomagnets — synthesis of Cr7Ni 'horseshoe' rings and related cage clusters as prototype molecular qubits with long T2 times; (2) Multi-qubit molecular architectures — covalently linked molecular qubit pairs and arrays for quantum gate operations and distributed sensing; (3) Quantum error correction in molecules — designing molecular systems encoding logical qubits with error protection; (4) Quantum sensing applications — molecular spin systems as ultra-sensitive nanoscale magnetic sensors in the sub-nm regime. Leading the NPL M4Q Network and UK molecular qubit community.