Dr Matthew Gibson has been awarded the 2015 'PAT Young Talent Award' during the 13th Polymers for Advanced Technologies conference in HongZhou, China. The award is sponsered by Wiley and Polymers for Advanced Technologies and also ACS Materials and Interfaces. Matt was selected by a panel following lectures from the shortlisted candidates from around the world, after being nominated.

Józef Lewandowski was awarded Anatole Abragam Prize of International Society of Magnetic Resonance "for his outstanding accomplishments to date and his promise in the development of solid-state NMR methodology and its application to the study of biomolecular structure and dynamics." The prize will be presented during ISMAR Conference in Shanghai.

At the Chemistry Departments annual postgraduate symposium, Robert Deller (GibsonGroup) and Athina anastasaki (HaddletonGroup) won the prizes for the best PhD Theses. The Thesis prize is Sponsored by the Faculty of Science.

Adrian Chaplin has been award one of this years Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prizes from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Dave Haddleton has recently been given the PTN (Polymer Technology Netherlands) 2015 “Medema Award”.

The annual prize is awarded to prolific polymer scientists who interact, or have close ties, with polymer research in the Netherlands. The award is named after the late PTN chairman, Dick Medema, who was the former R&D director at Shell.

The list of previous award winners can be found at: http://www.ptn.nu/award/index.htm.

Sarah-Jane Richards, of the Gibson Group, has been awarded an IAS Fellowship. This will enable to further her work into new methods for the detection and neutralisation of pathogens developed during her PhD (e.g. Chem Sci 2014 5, 1621, Angew. Chem.2012, 51, 7812). This fellowship will enable her to translate these findings into more sophisticated sensory systems.

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.

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.