Shady Business: Automatically Dimming Windows with an Adjustable Response Daniele Lucini, Raphael Kay, Joanna Aizenberg Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge | Chemistry | 2026 Indoor climate control is very energetically expensive, accounting for approximately 30% of global energy usage. Buildings with static elements cannot adapt to changing environmental conditions, thus rendering them inefficient and expensive as they are reliant on other devices, such as lights, to maintain a comfortable internal environment. Dynamic systems can broadly be classified as passive or active, depending on whether they respond to an external stimulus or user input. The former, whilst very energy efficient, cannot be decoupled from the external stimuli, and hence are not customisable. Conversely, active systems, although very adjustable to the needs of the user, are often expensive to run. We seek to create a dynamic system with a baseline passive response, that can be further adjusted actively at a low cost. Photoswitches are molecules capable of being in two states, which absorb different wavelengths of light. We incorporated photoswitches with a transparent, UV absorbing state, and a coloured, visible absorbing state into a film to account for the passive response of the material. When illuminated with broadband light from a solar simulator, an equilibrium between these two states is established, resulting in a loss of transmitted light. The percentage transmittance of visible light through the sample during irradiation was measured to quantify this passive response. We hypothesise that introducing fluidic filters containing either a UV or visible light absorbing dye will have a large effect on the position of equilibrium between the two photoswitch states and hence result in a significant change in transmissivity, even at low concentrations of dye. This would demonstrate that these films have an automatic response to light intensity, which can be altered by reversibly injecting fluidic light filters into a cavity. These systems would simultaneously have low energy costs, and a highly customisable indoor climate. Identifying Preventative Neurological Biomarkers Underlying Resilience to Childhood Maltreatment Lamisa Mahmud, Kyoko Ohashi, Martin Teicher

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