News

Congratulations to Sharon Udall who won the first ever Warwick unsung hero staff award.

In the Research Excellence Framework (REF) announced in late December 2014, an independent panel of experts confirmed us as one of the top Chemistry Departments in the UK. We were ranked =6th overall for research quality (with Imperial and UCL) with 98% of our research classified as “world-leading” or “internationally excellent”.

The University's complete results can be found here.

Congratulations to James Silk who won the Salters’ Graduate Prize at their Annual Awards Ceremony.

3 Academics in the Department have been awarded prestigious ERC starting grants with a total value of almost €5 million. Set up in 2007 by the EU, the European Research Council (ERC) is the first pan-European funding organisation for frontier research. It aims to stimulate scientific excellence in Europe by encouraging competition for funding between the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age.

Dr Adrian Chaplin will develop new synthetic methodology for studying the interaction of alkanes with transition metals.
Dr Matthew Gibson will study mimics of antifreeze (glyco)proteins with the aim of improving cell cryopreservation.
Dr Józef Lewandowski will develop and apply approaches to investigate structural dynamics of large protein complexes by solid- and solution-state NMR.

These awards bring the total number of ERC-funded researches in the Department to 8, a clear testament to the internationally-leading nature of the research environment at Warwick.

In a recent ACS Nano paper, the Costantini and Jones groups report on a novel 2D molecular assembly mode driven by charge transfer at the metal-organic interface.

prof. Stefan Bon, in collaboration with prof. To Ngai from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has edited a book published by the Royal Society of Chemistry entitled Particle-Stabilized Emulsions and Colloids: Formation and Applications. The book contains the latest scientific developments and key understandings of Pickering stabilization, a phenomenon whereby solid particles adhere to soft deformable interfaces for example emulsion droplets. Applications in areas of polymer chemistry, food, and oil processing are elucidated. A selection of internationally leading scientists have contributed with individual chapters. The book is available to buy now.

Research performed in Richard Walton’s group by recently completed PhD student Craig Hiley has been selected as a highlight of ISIS science for 2014. The research made use of ISIS, the UK’s spallation neutron source at Harwell, to study the atomic and magnetic structures of new ruthenium oxide materials prepared by new mild chemical routes. The work, published earlier this year in Angewandte Chemie, was a collaboration involving industrial partners Johnson Matthey plc and physicists in Warwick and Dresden, and shows how exploration of solution chemistry allows new crystalline materials to be isolated with interesting structures and properties.

Link to ISIS Annual Review for 2014

Link to Angewandte Chemie paper Ruthenium(V) Oxides from Low-Temperature Hydrothermal Synthesis

The Fox group in collaboration with the Costantini group and IBM Zürich report the synthesis and characterisation of a range of Kekulé/non-Kekulé PAHs by STM/AFM with amazing resolution. Isolation of previously intangible and significantly less stable compounds with complex reaction mechanisms, in combination with the imaging used to help identify these compounds has highlighted an appealing synthetic-physical collaboration in characterising compounds.

The full article is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/chem.201404877.

Lewandowski group in collaboration with Grzesiek (Basel, Switzerland) and Samoson (Tallinn, Estonia) groups has introduced a new solid-state NMR based approach that enables quantitative structural and dynamics studies of large protein complexes in a few nanomole quantities. This manuscript signifying a dawn of new era for high resolution NMR studies of large protein complexes has been featured in JACS Spotlights. Read the article in JACS.

The GibsonGroup's recent work on antifreeze-protein mimics has been highlighted on the front cover of RSC Biomaterials Science. http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/bm/c4bm00153b#!divAbstract

The Hatton group report in Advanced Materials a new type of high transparency electrode for organic photovoltaics (OPVs), based on an ultra-thin bilayer of copper and amorphous tungsten suboxide, which derives its remarkable optical and electrical properties from diffusion of copper into the oxide layer at room temperature. As the window electrode in efficient OPVs this electrode performs as well as indium-tin oxide glass - the leading transparent electrode technology - by trapping light in a resonant optical cavity.

Full article available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201404263

PhD student David Burnett from Richard Walton’s group was awarded best poster prize at the International Solvothermal and Hydrothermal Association conference held in Bordeaux October 26-29^th. His poster, "Hydrothermal Synthesis of Doped RuO₂ Materials", concerned new synthetic routes to conducting oxide materials.