Dr Yevheniia Kholina

Background

Originally from Ukraine, Yevheniia Kholina received her Master’s degree in Materials Science from Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (2016), followed by a Master’s in Chemistry from the Erasmus Mundus MaMaSELF programme (2019), with training at the University of Montpellier, the Technical University of Munich, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She completed her PhD at ETH Zürich (2025), where her work on controlling the local structure of Prussian Blue Analogues was recognised with the PhD Prize from the Swiss Society for Crystallography. She joined the University of Oxford in 2025 as an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow in Professor Andrew Goodwin’s group and as a Fellow by Special Election at Magdalen College in 2026.

Research Interests

My research focuses on control of disorder in crystals.

Crystals are typically seen as highly ordered, periodic structures — but real crystals are not. Atoms can be displaced, sites left vacant, or molecules oriented differently from one unit cell to the next. Far from being defects, these deviations from perfect order often improve useful properties like gas selectivity in porous materials or mechanical flexibility. Crucially, such defects are not randomly distributed: chemical interactions between neighbouring sites give rise to correlations, producing a whole spectrum of partially ordered states between perfect order and complete randomness.

I aim to understand and control this correlated disorder. During my PhD, I showed that the degree of local order in Prussian Blue Analogues can be continuously tuned through crystal growth conditions — and that this tunability directly affects symmetry, framework stability, and gas sorption. At Oxford, I am extending my research to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — materials whose modular, building-block nature offers exceptional potential for bottom-up design of disorder. My objectives are accelerating the discovery of new aperiodic MOFs; developing synthetic control over the degree of disorder; and investigating responsive disorder in flexible MOFs that switch between distinct configurations in response to external stimuli.

Selected Publications

Y. Kholina et al., “Symmetry breaking in Prussian Blue Analogues via growth–guided local ordering of hexacyanometallate vacancies”, Nat. Commun. (2026).

H. L. B. Boström, Y. Kholina, A. Simonov, “Stimuli-responsive Prussian blue analogues”, J. Mater. Chem. C (2025).

Y. Kholina et al., “Metastable disordered phase in flash-frozen Prussian Blue analogues”, Acta Cryst. B 78, 369–375 (2022).