Ludmilla is an Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and the Goodenough Tutorial Fellow at Saint Catherine’s College. She obtained her B.Sc and M.Sc. degrees in Chemistry from the University of Siegen (Germany). Already during her undergraduate studies she developed an interest in electrochemistry and semiconductor physics driving her to pursue her M.Sc. final project on dye-sensitized solar cells in the group of Professor Michael Grätzel at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). Staying in the same group, she worked on oxide thin film photoelectrodes applied in photoelectrochemical water splitting and perovskite solar cells during her Ph.D. degree which she obtained in 2016.
Ludmilla joined the group of Professor James Durrant at Imperial College London to study photochemical and photophysical processes in semiconductors using time-resolved spectroscopy and shortly after was awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2017-2019). Ludmilla began her independent research career as Imperial College Research Fellow (2019-2021) before moving to Oxford in October 2021.
Ludmilla was awarded the 2023 Materials Chemistry Early Career Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry for seminal contributions to the understanding of defect chemistry in semiconducting materials and interfacial energetics in photocatalytic and photovoltaic devices.
Her group’s research at Oxford aims at the design of atomically defined photo- and electrocatalysts that convert CO2, water and other “waste products” to energy-rich fuels and chemicals with high conversion efficiency, selectivity and long operational stability which they pursue thanks to funding by the UKRI (for the ERC Starting Grant), SCG Chemicals, the Royal Society, the John Fell Fund and the University of Oxford.
