Congratulations to Professor Julie Macpherson who has recently been awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship.

This award will allow Julie to translate the boron doped diamond electrode research done at WEIG into the commercial world with collaborators Element 6, to deliver new all-diamond electrochemical sensors at cost effective prices.

The 2014 Midlands "ISE Satellite Student Regional Symposium on Electrochemistry: The Midlands Electrochemistry Group (MEG) meeting was hosted on Monday, 1st April in the Department of Chemistry, University of Loughborough, sponsored by the RSc, ISE, Alvatek, Metrohm Autolab UK. The annual event is designed to bring together electrochemistry groups from universities across the midlands to share research, and provide a platform for PhD researchers to talk about their work with peers in the same field.

This year, there were close to 100 attendees, with delegations from University of Warwick, Nottingham University, University of Birmingham, Loughborough University, the University of Leicester and the University of Bath. 12 talks covering a wide variety of electrochemistry were given by postgraduate students, along with over 10 poster presentations.

WEIG student Barak Aaronson was awarded the prize for the best talk (High Resolution Electrochemical Imaging in Ionic Liquids: Surface Structure Effects on Triiodide Reduction at Platinum Electrodes) and Lingcong Meng recieved a prize for his poster (Laser Heated Diamond Electrodes). Barak will now go forward to deliver his talk at the UK national meeting Electrochem 2014, and the work on laser heated diamond electrodes will be presented at the Faraday Discussion 172 in Sheffield later this year.

The group went for an evening meal in Loughborough to celebrate (kindly organised by Rob Channon and Barak).

PhD students Sophie Kinnear and Jenny Webb appeared in Parliament, on Monday 17th March, as part of SET (Science, Engineering and Technology) for Britain, with the aim of promoting the research of early-career scientists. Both Sophie and Jenny presented their ongoing research to a panel of academics and Members of Parliament, which was followed by a reception and prize-giving in the House of Commons Terrace Marquee.

SET for Britain is a national poster competition run by the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee together with the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Society of Biology with the aim to encourage, support and promote early-stage and early-career research scientists.

We are pleased to announce that Tom Miller has passed his PhD Viva. Everyone enjoyed his speech and celebrating his success!

A WEIG publication on Carbon Nanotube Mapping has recently been featured as a research highlight in Nature Nanotechnology (to be found here).

Our paper Mapping Nanoscale Electrochemistry of Individual Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes, A. G. Güell, K. E. Meadows, P. V. Dudin, N. Ebejer, J. V. Macpherson, and Patrick R. Unwin, Nano Lett., 2014, 14 (1), 220–224) uses SECCM to show that the sidewalls of both semiconducting and metallic nanotubes are electrochemically active towards simple, one-electron redox couples - a result that has previously been disputed.