 Symposium Prizes for Ed Emmett and Rebecca Maksymowicz
DPhil Students win 1st and 2nd Prize for research talks given at the 24th Regional SCI Postgraduate Symposium on "Novel Organic Chemistry" in London.
Ed Emmett a DPhil in the Willis group won first place, while Rebecca Maksymowicz a DPhil in the Fletcher group won second place, at the postgraduate symposium held April 25th at Imperial College in London.
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 Fellow of The Royal Society
Professor Christopher Schofield has been elected FRS. The Royal Society wrote that "Chris Schofield is an international-leader in functional, structural and mechanistic studies on enzymes in particular those employing oxygen and 2-oxoglutarate cosubstrates. His work has opened up new fields in antibiotic research, oxygen sensing and gene regulation. After groundbreaking work on plant and microbial oxygenases, he pioneered structurally informed functional assignments for uncharacterised oxygenases. His research identified unanticipated roles for oxygenases in regulating gene expression, importantly in the hypoxic response, and revealed new modifications to chromatin, RNA splicing proteins and ribosomes. The work has identified new opportunities for medicinal intervention that are being pursued by numerous academic and commercial laboratories."
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 Fellow of The Royal Society
Professor Harry Anderson has been elected FRS. The Royal Society wrote that "Harry Anderson is known internationally for his insightful contributions to the design and synthesis of supramolecular materials and molecular wires. He has introduced new concepts for molecular design, and ground-breaking approaches to template-directed synthesis, leading to materials with unprecedented electronic and nonlinear optical characteristics. He has pioneered the investigation of conjugated porphyrin oligomers, encapsulated pi-systems, nanorings and two-photon absorbing dyes, and he has worked closely with physicists and photobiologists to understand the relationship between molecular structure and function. His work has resulted in profound insights into the factors controlling long-range electronic coupling and charge-transport in supramolecular systems".
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 Poster Prize
Jonathan Storey wins the prize for best poster at the 13th International Symposium on Spin and Magnetic Field Effects in Bad Hofgastein. The meeting was intended to bring together scientist of different central European countries at one place to discuss their recent results.
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 On the Cover of Science
3D printing of a network of water droplets by Gabriel Villar, Alexander D. Graham and Hagan Bayley has been highlighted on the cover of Science. After printing, the droplet network folded into a hollow sphere (diameter: 0.4 millimeters). In these designed tissue-like materials, adjacent compartments are separated by lipid bilayers and can communicate with each other and the environment. Such printed materials might be used to deliver drugs or, in the long term, to augment failing organs.
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 Poster prize at SET competition in the House of Commons
Tim Rooney from the Conway Group came third for his poster "Developing small molecule inhibitors of the CREBBP Bromodomain-Histone interaction". He presented his work on the design of a chemical probe for an exciting epigenetic target, which has employed a fragment-based approach to develop potent and selective inhibitors of the CREBBP bromodomain. Iterative cycles of design, synthesis and in vitro evaluation has allowed the optimisation of a candidate compound.
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 John B. Goodenough Awarded National Medal of Science
Professor John B. Goodenough has received the National Medal of Science from President Obama. It is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government upon scientists, engineers, and inventors. Professor John B. Goodenough was Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory and medal was in part for his foundation work on lithium-ion batteries which he started at Oxford
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Oxford researcher strikes gold with chemistry display in Parliament
Chris Spicer, 25, a PhD student in the chemistry department at the University of Oxford, struck gold at a competition in the House of Commons, for the excellence of his chemistry research, walking away with a £3,000 prize. Chris presented his research on developing new chemistry for modifying proteins to dozens of politicians and a panel of expert judges as part of the poster competition SET for Britain, on Monday 18 March. His research was judged against 29 other shortlisted researchers' work and came out on top.
Chris said, "It's great to have our work recognized in a field where there is so much great science going on at the moment."
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 BP's Ultimate Field Trip
The final of BP's Ultimate Field Trip competition, in which a team of Oxford University chemists took part last week. The team devised a way to reduce the cost of car travel in China by making bioethanol from rice husks. The resulting fuel can be blended with petrol and used to power cars without any engine modifications, the team told the judges. Car owners who use this blended petrol can save themselves 8 US cents per litre, the team said.
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 Pittcon 2013 Editors' Gold Award - Senova Systems
Senova Systems of California for winning the 2013 Pittcon Editors' Award Gold Medal for their revolutionary pHit Scanner - the world's first calibration-free pH meter.
pHit is a revolutionary new pH sensor platform which replaces current glass electrodes with solid state smart sensors that contain no glass, require no user calibration and can be stored dry. Senova Systems' scientists and engineers began their mission by licensing key intellectual property developed by Professor Richard Compton at Oxford's Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory.
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 On the Cover of J. Org. Chem.
A Perspective article by Ben Pilgrim and Tim Donohoe has featured on the cover of Journal of Organic Chemistry. The article details the role of transition metals in the oxidative cyclisation of alkenes and subsequent application to natural product synthesis. The cover was designed with the help of Dr Karl Harrison
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 On the Cover of J. Chem. Theory Comput.
An article from Michele Ceriotti in the David Manolopoulos group, on the
use of non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques to elucidate
structural complexity in atomistic simulations has been highlighted on
the cover of JCTC.
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 Red Nose Day
The Keytones Red Nose Day concert and cake sale raised a fantastic £573.10 for Comic Relief. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible and came along to support us.
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 Cover picture for ChemSci
Research from groups in Bath (Drs Sofia Pascu and Rory Arrowsmith), The Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Dr Stan Botchway) and Oxford (Profs Jon Dilworth and Steve Faulkner and Drs Michael Jones, Mark Theobald and Philip Waghorn) has been published in Chem Sci 4, 1430-1441, 2013 with a cover picture from Dr Karl Harrison. The work describes the use of two-photon fluorescence lifetime measurements to determine the stabilities of metal complex in living cells
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 On the cover of Chem Comm
A paper describing the use of the Suzuki coupling to modify the glycocalyx of E coli by Chris Spicer from the Ben Davis group has been featured on the cover of Chem Comm. The cover was designed with the help of Karl Harrison and photography by Chris Spicer
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 Hot Angew Paper for Anaëlle Dumas from the Davis Group
Anaëlle Dumas, Christopher D. Spicer, Zhanghua Gao, Yuya A. Lin from the Davis group have had a paper on Self-Liganded Suzuki protein PEGylation highlighted as 'hot article'
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 Physical Review Letters Editors Suggestion
Experimental work conducted by Hongliang Zhang from the Egdell group on the Elettra synchrotron in Trieste, Italy has been highlighted as an Editors Suggestion in Physical Review Letters. The paper, published on the 1st February, used angle-resolved photoemission to demonstrate that very pronounced band bending at the surface of indium oxide (the material used as the window electrode in almost all liquid crystal displays) leads to quantisation of electrons in the accumulation layer in particle-in-a-box like states. The paper has important implications for the performance of devices where contact must be made to an In2O3 surfaces. Suggestions are highlighted each week by the editors of the journal to promote interdisciplinary reading in the hope that this will lead readers to explore areas of physics outside their own areas of interest. The selection is based on the potential interest in the results presented and, importantly, on the success of the paper in communicating its message, in particular to readers from other fields.
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 Hot paper in Angewandte Chemie
A paper by Tim Donohoe and Radek Lipinski reporting two new concepts applied to the synthesis of the C1-16 fragment of pectenotoxin 4 has been chosen as a hot paper by the journal Angewandte Chemie.
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 On the Cover of OBC
An article on the dual-action inhibitors of HIF prolyl hydroxylases that induce binding of a second iron ion from the Prof Schofield group has been highlighted on the cover of the latest OBC
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 Cancer Research UK funded student
Volunteers at the Cancer Research UK store in Duke Street held a champagne reception to mark the shop re-opening after refurb. They were joined by Cyrille Thinnes, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford's chemistry department, who is helping to develop new treatments of the disease and is sponsored by the charity. Mr Thinnes said: "Researching new ways to fight cancer is very expensive and it couldn't be done without charities like Cancer Research UK. Every time someone comes in here and buys something, they're making a contribution towards the next generation of treatments".
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 Record negative compressibility described in Nature Materials
The discovery by DPhil student Andrew Cairns (Goodwin Group) that a simple inorganic solid - zinc dicyanoaurate - actually expands under pressure has been published today by Nature Materials. Andrew's work - which was carried out in collaboration with Amber Thompson (Chem Cryst) and researchers at the ESRF and the Universities of Aachen and Montpellier - has implications in the development of artificial muscles and high-precision pressure sensors. The Journal has also commissioned an accompanying News and Views article to highlight Andrew's exciting result.
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 Poster Prize
Sean Gordon, a first year DPhil from the Brouard group was awarded first prize at the 2013 SDG meeting in Durham for the presentation of his group's poster entitled "Rotational angular momentum polarisation effects in the inelastic scattering of fully quantum state selected NO(X) with the rare gases.b
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 Student Award
Geoffrey Nelson, a final year D.Phil. student in Professor John Foord's group, won one of the student awards at the Material Research Society Fall Meeting 2012, held in Boston, Massachusetts. This award was given by the 6th Diamond Electronics and Biotechnology - From Fundamentals to Applictions symposium for his oral presentation entitled "Surface and electrical modification of boron-doped diamond to detect dopamine in the presence of ascorbic acid"
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 DPhil students win First and Runner-up Prizes at the RSC Organic Chemistry Poster Symposium
Christopher Spicer (supervisor Ben Davis) won 1st prize and Rebecca Maksymowicz (supervisor Steve Fletcher) won a runner up prize at the prestigious RSC Chemistry Poster Symposium held in London on Dec 3rd. The symposium received 120 abstract submissions and 33 students from around the UK were selected to attend.
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 Roman Abramovich invests in Oxford Catalysts
Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, is said to have injected £4.3m into Oxford Catalysts, the Aim-listed oil and gas technology company born out of the chemistry department. His stake of more than 3pc in the business is expected to be announced this morning, after the company raised £30.6m in a share issue yesterday. Oxford Catalysts develops technology to commercialise natural gas which would otherwise be burnt off and wasted as flares during oil production.
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