MAS student, Maria Kariuki, has established an initiative to provide a community platform for black Chemistry students of all levels. The aim is to foster an inclusive, safe space and to work with the Department of Chemistry to address issues faced by students from black ethnic backgrounds. Learn more here: Warwick Black Chemistry Society

The Annual MAS CDT conference took place in Somerset last week at the beautiful Knowle Manor on the edge of Exmoor. At the conference all MAS CDT students from MSc to PhD have an opportunity to present their project with a talk and poster.

We were fortunate to be joined by Laurent Blasco from Lubrizol who talked about sun care and careers in cosmetics as the rain poured down outside.

All MSc and PhD students presented their work and prizes were awarded as follows:

MSc Poster Prize: 1st place Monica Kumar, 2nd place: Adil Ajmal

PhD Poster Prize: 1st place: Martin Lea, Joint 2nd place: Rhiannon Brooks and Kelsey Cremin

PhD Talk Prize: 1st place: Bryan Marzullo, 2nd place: Ruben Tomas

Congratulations to Mary J. Thomas, who is a MAS CDT student, for winning the Barber Prize for best student talk at the 39th annual meeting of the British Mass Spectrometry Society in Cambridge. Based upon collaborative research with the British Geological Survey, Mary presented her talk entitled “Petroleomic Depth Profiling of Contaminated Staten Island Soil by GC and FT-ICR MS.” Using Rock-Eval 6 data and ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry, complex compositional depth profiles were developed for environmental monitoring and to provide insight into the site’s history of contamination.