In November 2018, the Monash Warwick Alliance funded Chemists to develop and identify cost-effective, highly active, selective and stable catalysts. Check their progress...

The department of Chemistry expects to appoint around 60 funded and self-funded PhD and MSc students in the 2021/2022 academic year

Fabienne Bachtiger, part of the Sosso group, presented her research to dozens of politicians and a panel of expert judges, as part of the poster competition STEM for BRITAIN, on Monday 9th March in the House of Commons. The competition was strong but she won a Silver award for the excellence of her chemistry research, walking away with a £1,250 prize and medal.

Build a magical castle or set off an eternal winter? Maybe not...but scientists @warwickuni are working on some very exciting projects at very low temperatures.

The end of reapplying sunscreen could be on the horizon after scientists found a molecule which can ‘dance’ away the harmful sunlight.

Plants stay safe from the Sun because they hold a molecule which absorbs ultraviolet light and uses the energy to shake at a speed of 100 billion twists per second, which expends the radiation before it can cause harm.

Scientists at the University of Warwick searched for a structure with similar properties and discovered that diethyl sinapate closely mimics the process when exposed to sunlight.

A collaboration between the Fox, Scott and Gibson groups has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The team were inspired by how small helical antifreeze proteins in Nature enable extreomophiles to survive low temperatures, where other species would not survive. Rather than using traditional peptide/protein chemistry, the team used self-assembled metallohelicates which have similar dimensions to a small alpha helix, and found some which were remarkably potent at stopping ice crystal growth ; a major technological challenge in applications from wind farms, to aircraft to cryopreservation. Modelling studies showed that the underlying activity could be linked the patches of hydrophobicity (water liking) and hydrophobicity (water hating).

Read the paper here

Antifreeze Protein Mimetic Metallohelices with Potent Ice Recrystallization Inhibition Activity

Several studentship opportunities for PhD study are available in the Chemistry Department of Warwick University.

Prestigious RSC awards for Prof. Rachel O'Reilly, Dr Józef Lewandowski and PhD student Zoe Ayres.

Warwick Chemistry has played a lead role in securing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for 2 new Centres for Doctoral training, in Molecular Analytical Science and Diamond Science and Technology, as part of the recently announced UK's largest investment in postgraduate training in engineering and physical sciences. The Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts, announced the funding of over seventy new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), spread across 24 UK universities on 22nd November.

For further information please visit:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/university_of_warwick_takes_share_of_163350m_to_train_tomorrow146s_engineers_and_scientists1

http://onlinepressoffice.tnrcommunications.co.uk/universities-funding/video 

Three new papers from the Troisi group on the theory of charge transport appear in high profile journals. Two of them study the relation between polymer structure and charge transport and appeared in Advanced Functional Materials and Journal of the American Chemical Society, focusing respectively on semicrystalline and amorphous polymeric semiconductors. A third one, in collaboration with the Cambridge University, explores the role of dynamic fluctuations on the electronic structure of molecular semiconducting crystals and appared in Nature Materials. Seen together these papers highlight the role of theory in understanding all classes of organic semiconducting materials.

For theory to make proper contact with experiment, we must average over a large number of geometrical configurations. For big metalloproteins like Type I copper plastocyanin and cucumber basic protein, generating the structures is too expensive for quantum chemistry. In contrast, the empirical ligand field molecular mechanics model invented by the Deeth group at Warwick can quickly generate the geometries required. Based on our structures, Nick Besley's group in Nottingham excise the active sites and use them to compute using high level QM methods the absorption and CD spectra. Agreement with experiment is impressive. See the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B: 10.1021/jp404107j