News

John Sidda, a PhD student in Christophe Corre’s group, has been awarded an Early Career Fellowship by the Institute of Advanced Study. During his PhD studies conducted between the Department of Chemistry and School of Life Sciences, his research has focussed on regulatory mechanisms involved in bacterial natural product biosynthesis, leading to the discovery of new Streptomyces venezuelae natural products (Chem. Sci. 2014, 5, 86-89). His tenure as an IAS Early Career Fellow will allow him to develop the methods used for natural product discovery in other Streptomyces species.

Paul Sullivan and Luke Rochford, in collaboration with researchers at CSIRO in Melbourne, Australia, report in Chemical Communications on a new non-fullerene acceptor material for evaporated organic solar cells.

Zoe Ayres and Sarah-Jane Richards (from Electrochemistry and Gibson Groups) won the main and runner up prizes in the first #RSCAnalyticalPoster competition. The competition was entirely based on twitter, with the aim of creating a poster, which succinctly summarised an application or method in analytial science. The competition attracted signficant interest with > 1k tweets, to an audience >300k and >1 million impressions.

Sarah-Jane won the main prize with her poster 'Cholera and Sugars' and Zoe a runner-up prize with her poster using diamond electrochemical Sensors.

Dr Matthew Gibson has been awarded the RSC/Dextra Medal for Carbohydrate Science. This award, which is sponsored by Dextra Laboratories, was founded in 1970. It is presented to a scientist in the early/mid stage of their career for meritorious work in carbohydrate chemistry that has largely been conducted in the UK.

Matt will present a lecture, and recieve the medal at the joint RSc/COST MultiglycoNano Meeting in Bangor, Wales, in April.

To read more about the GibsonGroup's research visit their webpage.

Other colleagues were nominated for an award and enjoyed the opportunity of celebrating with Sharon.

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