Departmental news
RSC awards for Warwick researchers
Prestigious RSC awards for Prof. Rachel O'Reilly, Dr Józef Lewandowski and PhD student Zoe Ayres.
Two new Centres for Doctoral Training
Warwick Chemistry has played a lead role in securing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for 2 new Centres for Doctoral training, in Molecular Analytical Science and Diamond Science and Technology, as part of the recently announced UK's largest investment in postgraduate training in engineering and physical sciences. The Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts, announced the funding of over seventy new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), spread across 24 UK universities on 22nd November.
For further information please visit:
http://onlinepressoffice.tnrcommunications.co.uk/universities-funding/video
Three new reports on the theory of organic semiconductors
Three new papers from the Troisi group on the theory of charge transport appear in high profile journals. Two of them study the relation between polymer structure and charge transport and appeared in Advanced Functional Materials and Journal of the American Chemical Society, focusing respectively on semicrystalline and amorphous polymeric semiconductors. A third one, in collaboration with the Cambridge University, explores the role of dynamic fluctuations on the electronic structure of molecular semiconducting crystals and appared in Nature Materials. Seen together these papers highlight the role of theory in understanding all classes of organic semiconducting materials.
Making contact with experiment
For theory to make proper contact with experiment, we must average over a large number of geometrical configurations. For big metalloproteins like Type I copper plastocyanin and cucumber basic protein, generating the structures is too expensive for quantum chemistry. In contrast, the empirical ligand field molecular mechanics model invented by the Deeth group at Warwick can quickly generate the geometries required. Based on our structures, Nick Besley's group in Nottingham excise the active sites and use them to compute using high level QM methods the absorption and CD spectra. Agreement with experiment is impressive. See the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B: 10.1021/jp404107j
Polymers which thinks they're antifreeze proteins
The Gibson group have undertaken a detailed study into the ability of synthetic polymers to inhibit the growth of ice crystals - this is a fundmental process of incredible importance in biology (survival of extremophiles), medicine (cryoprotectection of cells/organs) and industry (preventing ice-induced damage). The Gibson group are pioneering the use of polymers as alternative to antifreeze proteins - Nature's cryoprotectants, using a combination of chemical, analytical, biological and computational methods
Read their latest paper here, in collaboration with R. Notman (CSC): http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm400217j
New design rule for dyes in dye sensitized solar cells
In a recent issue of Angewandte Chemie the Warwick team of Emanuele Maggio, Natalia Martsinovich and Alessandro Troisi reports a new design strategy to improve dye sentitized solar cells. Good dyes, when excited by solar radiation, inject very rapidly an electron to the semiconductor they are adsorbed onto. However it is also desirable that, when they have lost the electron, these dyes are not neutralized again by the semiconductor. The authors combined ideas from group theory with their methodology to study electron transfer at the interface to propose a new family of dyes that inject the electron rapidly but are very reluctant to take the electron back.
Dr Rebecca Notman Awarded Royal Society University Research Fellowship
Dr Rebecca Notman has been awarded a prestigious 5-year Royal Society University Research Fellowship starting October 2012 to pursue a research project on “Modelling the Lipid Layers of the Human Skin Barrier”.
Two photons are better than one
Sadler and Stavros groups in collaboration with Prof Martin Paterson at Heriot-Watt University, publish work in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The work describes the first demonstration of a 2-photon activated, square planar platinum (II) complex. The enhanced photolabilization demonstrated may be useful in the design of novel photoactivatable platinum chemotherapeutic agents in situations where deep tissue penetration is needed. Read the article here.
Irène Joliot-Curie Conference - Establishing an Independent Career in Chemistry
Establishing an independent academic career is an exciting and challenging process. The data available for UK chemistry suggests that more women than men find the process not exciting enough or too challenging. A key aspect of success in any career path is finding role models, establishing networks, and being tapped into good sources of information. Our aim is therefore to create opportunities for all of these in the first (and subsequent) Irène Joliot-Curie conference.