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Hello everyone!

Welcome to the "Blog" section of my ePortfolio. This is where you will be able to find out a bit more about me and my day-to-day adventures. I will try and keep it as up-to-date as possible.

It is actually a really good day to start blogging, since it is a day of great suprises and exciting challenges (to put it that way...). To give you some background information, I am all about the physical chemistry, not only because I enjoy it a lot more than organic/synthetic chemistry, but also because I am pretty bad at organic chemistry anyway. So synthesis has never been my friend, and it is a mutual feeling - I have actually not done any organic chemistry type practical work in two years, since the 3rd year of my UG degree was spent at RAL (check my profile for more info!), where it was all laser work, and then my 4th (masters) year was again spent in a laser lab doing depletion spectroscopy. NO CONTACT WITH GLASSWARE OR WEIRD CHEMICALS WHAT SO EVER.

And then you start a PhD and crazy things happen! Basically, we wanted to study ferulic acid in our setup, but because we need to heat it up (we want it in the gas phase, it is the "other people" in our group that do solution phase stuff) the molecule just breaks apart and we have no signal from the molecule as we want to study it. So we need to turn a carboxylic acid into an ester, to try and make it more difficult for it to fragment under heat. This might be really intuitive for you if you were good at your organic chemistry modules, but I was asked to go and find a way to do it and I literally thought the guys were joking. They weren't! Anyway long story short, I ended up in the UG labs setting up a reflux to esterify ferulic acid. Thankfully, I had the help of a great (real) chemist, Vic, who pretty much turned the general procedure I had found on google scholar into a "real-life" specific procedure we could work with, and offered to supervise the newbies to make sure the reaction was done safely (there are some pretty nasty chemicals involved, and a reflux is always scary anyway). Thanks, Vic!

Even though I was dreading the whole thing from the start, it was actually quite refreshing to do something different and, despite the fact that I am still worried the thing is going to explode at some point, I really enjoyed the challenge. Tomorrow, we need to purify it on a silica gel column! WOW! I think I've done that once in my life, a long time ago...

Bring on the next challenge!

I took pictures of the reflux apparatus, as proof - I might not believe it when I wake up tomorrow.