Solar fuels in Tuscany — LIMNO at the 2026 Gordon Research Conference
© 2026 EPFL
Two PhD students from the lab attended one of the most important gatherings in the solar fuels community, held this year at a Renaissance estate in the heart of Tuscany.
Earlier this month, PhD students Benjamin Goldman and Aurélie Célérien travelled to Lucca, Italy, to attend the 2026 Gordon Research Conference on Renewable Energy: Solar Fuels. Held at the Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco from May 3 to 8, the GRC brought together researchers from across the solar fuels field for a week of talks, discussions, and good times in this beautiful region of Italy.
Gordon Research Conferences occupy a distinct place in the academic calendar. Their format, with sessions spread across mornings and evenings, and afternoons deliberately left open, is designed to encourage conversation beyond the lecture room. For PhD students, they offer a rare window into where the field is heading and a chance to engage directly with senior researchers in a relatively intimate setting.
Benjamin gave a talk on the development of a scalable porous monolithic architecture for solar water splitting, a device concept he refers to as the "Janus" artificial leaf, where the two-sided design allows each face to independently manage the two half-reactions of water splitting. Aurélie presented a poster on how platinum-halide interactions influence photocatalytic hydrogen production in organic semiconductor nanoparticles, a question with direct implications for the rational design of molecular photocatalysts.
Both presentations were opportunities to engage with researchers working on related problems, and to situate LIMNO's work within the broader conversations happening in the solar fuels field.
We hope that they had a lot of fun there and can't wait to see have them back!