News

Congratulations to Jon Rourke for the Andrew McCamley Teaching Award

Congratulations to Vas Stavros who is highly commended at this year’s Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence

Józef Lewandowski was awarded Anatole Abragam Prize of International Society of Magnetic Resonance "for his outstanding accomplishments to date and his promise in the development of solid-state NMR methodology and its application to the study of biomolecular structure and dynamics." The prize will be presented during ISMAR Conference in Shanghai.

Anish Mistry (supervisor: David Fox) is a finalist in the Three Minute Thesis competition being held this afternoon as part of the Postgraduate Research Showcase: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/scs/pgr/opportunities/showcase

Warwick Chemistry took part in the 2015 Cheltenham Festival of Science with hands-on demonstrations by Nick Barker and helpers, and a lecture by Matt Gibson.

ACS Nano has highlighted new work from Warwick on graphene electrochemistry in its "In Nano" section ('Living on the Edge for Graphene and Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite'), featuring the most important work in the journal. Led by Dr. Aleix Guell and Prof. Patrick Unwin, the team employed the unique Scanning Electrochemical Cell Microscopy (SECCM) technique - invented at Warwick - to highlight how the number of graphene layers and graphene edges influenced electrochemical activity; and, further, how any differences in activity depended on the redox mediator and the electronic band structure of the different characteristic graphene and graphite structural motifs. With this work, the Warwick Electrochemistry and Interfaces Group has brought definitive new insights that help to reveal the complex and exciting world of graphene electrochemistry, contributing major understanding on the electrochemical activity of sp2 carbons, which are finding increasing use for energy and sensing applications.

Redox-Dependent Spatially Resolved Electrochemistry at Graphene and Graphite Step Edges

Aleix G. Güell *, Anatolii S. Cuharuc , Yang-Rae Kim , Guohui Zhang , Sze-yin Tan , Neil Ebejer , and Patrick R. Unwin *

Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom

ACS Nano, 2015, 9 (4), pp 3558–3571

DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5b00550

The Postgraduate Symposium took place on Wednesday 27th May 2015.

Full details including the programme and a list of prizewinners are here:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/chemistry/chemintra/postgrad/phdinfo/postgraduatesymposium/postgraduatesymposium2015

At the Chemistry Departments annual postgraduate symposium, Robert Deller (GibsonGroup) and Athina anastasaki (HaddletonGroup) won the prizes for the best PhD Theses. The Thesis prize is Sponsored by the Faculty of Science.

The journal editors have selected a recent paper in Chemistry–A European Journal from Philip Chan’s group as a Hot Paper. The work describes a synthetic method to prepare 3a,6-methanoisoindole esters by gold(I)-catalyzed tandem 1,2-acyloxy migration/Nazarov cyclization and Diels-Alder reaction of 1,4,9-dienyne esters. One example was found to inhibit binding of tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a) to the tumor necrosis factor receptor 1 (TNFR1) site and TNF-induced nuclear factor k-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells (NF-kB) activation in cell at a half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC₅₀) value of 6.6 mM. The study showed the isoindolyl derivative to exhibit low toxicity toward human hepatocellular liver carcinoma (HepG2) cells and its possible mode of activity based on molecular modeling analysis.

The full article is available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1521-3765/homepage/2111_hotpaper.html

Philip Chan’s group have this week published a paper in Journal of the American Chemical Society describing a synthetic method to prepare tricyclic bridged heptenones and hexenones from gold(I)-catalyzed double cycloisomerization of 1,11-dien-3,9-diyne benzoates. The work found a divergence in product selectivity could be achieved by fine-tuning the steric nature of the ligand of the Au(I) catalyst. In the presence of the catalyst [MeCNAu(JohnPhos)]⁺SbF₆^-, a tandem 1,3-acyloxy migration/metallo-Nazarov cyclization/1,6-enyne addition/Cope rearrangement of the substrate selectively occurred to afford the seven-membered ring system. In contrast, with the [MeCNAu(Me₄tBuXPhos)]⁺SbF₆^- catalyst, the 1,11-dien-3,9-diyne benzoate was observed to undergo a more rapid tandem 1,3-acyloxy migration/metallo-Nazarov cyclization/[4 + 2]-cyclization pathway to give the bridged hexenone.

The full article is available online at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jacs.5b02377

The Bugg and Gibson groups are involved in 2 new projects intended to promote translation of new technologies. These projects are funded by the Industrial Biocatalyst program supported by Innovate UK, BBSRC and EPSRC and span a range of UK universities and companies.

Adrian Chaplin has been award one of this years Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prizes from the Royal Society of Chemistry.