We are pleased to announce Ezat Khoshdel has been appointed as an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the department. Ezat has been a long-standing collaborator with the department with multiple projects over 25 years. Ezat has recently retired from Unilever where he was the inventor of over 150 patents, the largest number of any Unilever employee. Ezat will be more than happy to discuss ideas and work across the department and add to our impact activities. Ezat can be contacted on E.Khoshdel@warwick.ac.uk and will next be in the department on October 11^th when he gives a lecture to our new Polymer MSc cohort.

Congratulations to Sam Lawton who has just won this year's Young Persons' Lecture Competition.

Sponsored by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, with support from The Worshipful Company of Armourers & Brasiers, the Young Persons' Lecture Competition invites students and professionals up to the age of 28 to deliver a short lecture on a materials, minerals, mining, packaging, clay technology and wood science related subject.

There were three rounds to the competition: the regional heats, regional finals, and the national finals which took place on 25 April, and Sam wins a prize of £750 and a trip to South Africa to compete in the world finals.

Sam is a final year PhD student under the supervision of Prof Dave Haddleton, and is currently working on developing new materials for the next generation of solar cells.

Congratulations to Dr Matthew Jenner, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry, who has been awarded a BBSRC Future Leader Fellowship.

Full press release here

Sir John Warcup Cornforth was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who was born a century ago (7 September 1917).

Sir John was known for his work in the field of stereochemistry, the study of how the spatial arrangement of atoms affects the properties of a chemical compound. He went on to study at the University of Oxford and work as a professor at the universities of Warwick, Suffolk and California in Los Angeles.

In celebration of what would have been his 100th birthday, Sir John has been honoured with a Google Doodle.

For more information, see the original article in The Daily Telegraph.