Research Prizes and Awards
Dr Steve Liddle has been awarded the 2011 Bill Newton award from the RSC Radiochemical Group. The award is made biennially and is made for “recent outstanding contributions to any aspect of radiochemistry”.
First year PhD student Kyle Roberts has been awarded the Best Poster Prize at the university’s 2011 High Performance Computing (HPC) conference. The £100 iHPC Cash Prize and £50 Amazon Web Services voucher was for his poster entitled ‘DFT calculations of the vibrational frequencies of PAH clusters and metal-PAH complexes’ and forms part of his research in the Astrochemistry group. Runner-up Olga Ershova of the Quantum Chemistry and Spectroscopy group won a £50 iHPC Cash Prize + £20 Amazon Web Services voucher for her poster ‘UV and IR spectroscopy of an open-shell molecule’. The iHPC facility represents a major financial and strategic commitment to support the ever-growing area of numerical research as applied in a wide range of disciplines across the university.
Dr Andrei Khlobystov has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant entitled “From Nano Test Tube to Nano Reactor: Visualisation, Manipulation and Synthesis of Molecules at Nanoscale.” This project is designed to enable characterisation and manipulation of molecules at a single-molecule level, visualisation of mechanisms of chemical reactions in real space and time, and synthesis of molecules within nano-sized containers. High aspect ratio nanostructures, such as nanotubes and nanofibres, will serve as structural and functional bridges between the molecular world and the macro world. Understanding of how molecules interact with nano-containers and how they react with each other when confined within nano-reactors will give a new powerful set of tools to control the direction, selectivity and kinetics of chemical reactions.
PhD student Christian Spiteri has been selected to take part in "Roche Continents - Youth! Arts! Science!". He is one of 100 students from across Europe who is invited to Salzburg from 4- 10 August 2011 to participate in a wide-ranging program centered sround the arts and science.
Professor Martyn Poliakoff has received the Nyholm Prize for Education which recognises a major national or international research or innovation contribution to the field of chemical science education. He has been selected for his enthusiastic leadership in taking chemistry to the widest possible audience, using not only traditional channels but also the power of YouTube, and recognised as 'a true champion for chemistry'.
Dr Steve Liddle has been awarded the 2011 RSC Sir Edward Frankland Fellowship award for his contributions to f-element chemistry. The award is given to early career researchers who have made significant contributions to the field of organometallic or coordination chemistry and is awarded biennially.
Dr. Jonathan Fray, on behalf of the University’s Teaching and Learning Board, been awarded a Lord Dearing Fellowship for Teaching and Learning, 2011-12 in relation to developing our laboratory teaching programme around the collaboration with GSK.
PhD Student Xue Han, working for Professor Martyn Poliakoff and Professor Michael George, has been granted the 2010 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Chinese Students Study Abroad by China Scholarship Council (CSC). This award was founded by the Chinese Government in 2003 with the purpose of rewarding the academic excellence of self-financed Chinese students studying overseas. Only those with outstanding performance in their PhD studies will be considered by the award selection panel. This year only two students from the University of Nottingham won this award. Xue Han’s PhD research focused on the Photo-oxidation reactions using supercritical carbon dioxide as green solvent, where cleaner oxidation processes have been developed with higher efficiency and less environmental impacts. Happily for Xue Han, her husband, Sihai Yang, who was a PhD student with Professor Martin Schroder, won one of the 2009 Awards. So the couples’ awards are a double honour for the School of Chemistry.
Third-year PhD student Markus Hammonds has been awarded a prestigious Universitas 21 Scholarship by the University’s Graduate School to undertake 6 weeks of experiments in the Chemistry Department at The University of Hong Kong. Markus will be studying how polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules form in astronomical environments.
Professor Chris Moody has been selected to lecture by NOVARTIS scientists at their main research sites in Basel (Switzerland) and Cambridge (USA). The lectures focus on synthetic organic chemistry enhance the exposure of Novartis chemical community to cutting edge chemistry, and are attended by medicinal and process chemists from Novartis. They are also open to scientists from other companies and universities.
Dr Wim Thielemans has been invited to chair a workshop at the 42nd Session of the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, in Erice (Sicily) in August 2009 in collaboration with the World Federation of Scientists and the ICSC-World Laboratory. This will be on Biobased polymers and their fate in Nature, together with Richard Thompson of The University of Plymouth.
Dr David Mills, currently in the second year of a three year EPSRC-funded postdoctoral position with Dr Steve Liddle has received a Dalton Division bursary from the Royal Society of Chemistry for £580 to attend the INORG 2009 Conference in Bloemfontein, South Africa on the 13th September 2009. The bursary will cover transport and accommodation and conference fees will be waived. David is currently in the second year of a three year EPSRC-funded postdoctoral position, with Dr Steve Liddle, investigating the synthetic potential of lanthanide alkylidene complexes.
Dr Robert Stockman has been awarded the "Tetrahedron Most Cited Paper 2005-2008 Award" for his paper entitled "Chiral non-racemic sulfinimines: versatile reagents for asymmetric synthesis", D. Morton and R. A. Stockman, Tetrahedron, Volume 62, Issue 38 (2006), pages 8869-8905.
Professor Christopher Moody presented "From Amino Acids to Heteroaromatics - Nature's Heterocyclic Peptides" as the CU-Roche Colorado Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Colarado on Monday 22nd September 2008.