A study led by Maria Basso, a PhD student at the University of Padova, Italy, who visited the group for six months in 2022, has been selected as a Science Highlight by Diamond Light Source. Maria spent her time in the group working on developing a sol-gel dip-coating approach to vanadium dioxide films and their characterisation with a number of techniques, including laboratory and synchrotron-based X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. During her stay with us, she was able to join one of our beamtimes at beamline I09 at Diamond and we found a bit of spare time to run some of the samples made at UCL. This provided complementary information to the more surface-sensitive data collected in our system at UCL. You can read the full manuscript here.