 Syngenta Workshop Winners
Each year Syngenta runs a workshop for final year doctoral students. As a university, Oxford had the best representation on the scheme, having four students selected out of the fifteen on the workshop; James Lee (Steve Davies Group), Ben Pilgrim (Tim Donohoe Group), Alison Hawkins (Darren Dixon Group) and Ben Ayers (George Fleet Group). At the end of the workshop, Syngenta awarded four Scholarships consisting of £1000 cash prize and £1000 of conference expenses; three of these went to James Lee, Ben Ayers and Ben Pilgrim. Alison Hawkins also won one of the runners up prizes worth £500.
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 Mystery of car battery's current solved
Chemists have solved the 150 year-old mystery of what gives the lead-acid battery, found under the bonnet of most cars, its unique ability to deliver a surge of current. A team of researchers from Oxford University, the University of Bath, Trinity College Dublin, and the ISIS neutron spallation source, have explained for the first time the fundamental reason for the high conductivity of lead dioxide.
A report of the research appears in this week’s Physical Review Letters.
‘The unique ability of lead acid batteries to deliver surge currents in excess of 100 amps to turn over a starter motor in an automobile depends critically on the fact that the lead dioxide which stores the chemical energy in the battery anode has a very high electrical conductivity, thus allowing large current to be drawn on demand,’ said Professor Russ Egdell of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, an author of the paper.
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 Chem Comm Inside Cover Image
A research collaboration between Stuart Conway's group, Oxford's Pharmacology Dept and St Andrews has been published in Chem Comm and is illustrated with a cover design. The work focuses on irradiation of a mixture of 4-methoxyphenacyl-caged (S)-glutamate and 4,5-dimethoxy-2-nitrobenzyl-caged γ-amino butyric acid (GABA) on neurons, at 260 nm, evokes selective photorelease of (S)-glutamate (Glu) whereas photolysis at 405 nm causes selective photorelease of GABA. The image was designed by Karl Harrison.
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 Clara Immerwahr Award
Dr Kylie Vincent has just received the Clara Immerwahr Award, conferred annually to a young female scientist at an early stage of her career for outstanding results in Catalysis Research. The award is associated with financial support of 15.000 Euro for a research stay in the laboratory of scientists of the UniCat catalysis cluster in Berlin, and intended to pave the way for establishing close collaborative links with UniCat.
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 BBSRC Biotechnology Young Entrepreneurs Scheme Winners
An Oxford team incuding two chemistry DPhil students from the Armstrong group (Bonnie Murphy & Philip Wulff) won the BBSRC Biotechnology Young Entrepreneurs Scheme (YES) competition. The team pitched their plan for a hypothetical business called Metachem Solutions to a panel of investors. The panel were impressed by their idea for using yeast to produce high value fragrance components (photo credit Martyn Poynor)
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 Green Talents 2011
Dr Yatendra Chaudhary, who is a Marie Curie Fellow working in Professor Armstrong group is one of 20 winners of the 2011 'Green Talents' Competition, for which he is now on a tour of German Universities. Green Talents 2011 is an International Forum for High Potentials in Sustainable Development Competition of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
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 Double Award at National Cancer Research Institute Conference
Jon Williams, a 3rd Year DPhil student under the joint supervision of Dr Angela Russell and Prof. Adrian Harris (Dept. of Oncology), was recently awarded two prizes at the National Cancer Research Institute Conference in Liverpool. Jon gave an oral presentation and presented a poster at the conference, and was awarded the Richard Hambro abstract prize and also the runner-up prize in the poster competition. The work presented focussed on the investigation of a series of phosphofructokinase enzymes, specifically up-regulated in tumour cells, and the development of small molecule inhibitors of these enzymes, as potential anti-tumour agents.
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 Salters Graduate Prize 2011
Congratulations to Emma Stuart who is recipient of a Salters Graduate Prize 2011. Emma is a 1st year D.Phil. student in Professor Compton's group having done her M.Chem. at Southampton Uni. She is working on nanoelectrochemistry. Emma is pictured with the Rt Hon David Willetts to her left and the Rt Hon Lord Butler of Brockwell, Master of the Salters’ Company, to her right. Rt. Hon. David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science who presented the Awards at the Ceremony and commented:-
"It’s been an honour to present these awards and join the Salters’ Institute in recognising the science talent we have in our schools and universities. I have been incredibly impressed by the standard of winners and hope many will go on to be leaders in the science field."
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 Lilly Prizes for Excellence in Organic Chemistry Research
The Lilly Prizes for Excellence in Organic Chemistry Research are awarded by Eli Lilly and Company Ltd. They are awarded for excellence in the first year of postgraduate study and are assessed on the quality of experimental work, written submission and viva voce at the point of examination for PRS transfer of status to DPhil. The winners of the Lilly prizes for the year 2010-2011 are:
David Baker (Supervisor: Professor Tim Donohoe)
Edward Emmett (Supervisor: Dr Michael Willis)
Inga Pfeffer (Supervisors: Professor Chris Schofield and Professor Ben Davis)
The following students have received commendations for their performance at the PRS interviews and the high standard of their experimental work and written submissions:
Phin Chooi (Supervisor: Professor Ben Davis)
Alex Gregory (Supervisor: Professor Darren Dixon)
David Hewings (Supervisor: Dr Stuart Conway)
Kayli Johnson (Supervisor: Professor Darren Dixon)
Charlotte Richards-Taylor (Supervisor: Dr Michael Willis)
Tina Sovdat (Supervisor: Dr Stephen Fletcher)
Hua Wang (Supervisor: Professor Ben Davis)
James Wilkinson (Supervisor: Professor Harry Anderson)
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 Congratulations on HNC Award
Tim Powell has successfully completed his HNC in Electronic Engineering. Tim joined the PTCL Electronics Workshop in 2007 on an Advanced Apprenticeship, his HNC course was part of his study programme. Tim is now a fully qualified team member.
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 Winners of Pfizer 2nd year DPhil Poster Competition
The annual Pfizer Mini-symposium / 2nd year DPhil Poster Competition took place on the 20th of October. Speakers at the symposium were Dr Igor Larossa (Queen Mary University), Dr John Fossey (University of Birmingham) and Dr David Blakemore (Pfizer). This was followed by a poster session where second year DPhil students presented their research. Cash prizes were awarded to Anne Brock (Steve Davies Group) and Ben Pilgrim (Tim Donohoe Group) for their poster presentations, with Smita Gunnoo (Ben Davis group) being the winner of the contestants prize (voted by the participants).
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 Woman of the Future in Science and Technology
Kylie Vincent received the 2011 ‘Woman of the Future in Science and Technology’ Award last night at the Women of the Future awards dinner in London. Created by Pinky Lilani OBE in 2006 with Caspian Media, the Women of the Future awards celebrate the next generation of British female talent. The Science and Technology award recognises younger women flourishing in the broad technology industries. Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal was a special guest at the awards ceremony and Cherie Blair is a patron of the awards.
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 Poster Prize at BCA PCG Winter Meeting
Matt Cliffe, a first year DPhil student in Andrew Goodwin's group, recently won the poster prize at the joint ISIS Crystallography User Group and BCA PCG/ IoP SCMP Winter Meeting. Matt's poster outlined his work on new approaches to amorphous structure solution from diffraction data.
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 Glasstone Fellowship in Inorganic Chemistry
The Department is pleased to announce that Dr Kirsten E. Christensen will begin a three-year Glasstone Fellowship in Inorganic Chemistry from November. She will investigate scientifically interesting molecular materials with non-periodic order which gives rise to complex diffraction patterns.
Dr Christensen, who will be based in the Chemical Crystallography
group, said: "During the Fellowship, I will develop the understanding of modulation from a chemical perspective and provide new approaches for dealing with molecular modulated materials."
"Understanding the continuum of structural states from simple
structures to modulated and incommensurate materials via twinned crystalline domains, atomic and molecular disorder, and multiple non-symmetry related molecules (Z’>1) will be at the forefront of research in crystallography for the next decade. Materials which exist along this continuum can vary from simple molecules to large molecular assemblies. These bizarre structures are only now beginning to be understood."
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 Dalton Transactions Editorial Board Chairman.
The RSC has announced that Prof Philip Mountford will be the next Chairman of the Editorial Board of Dalton Transactions, one of the world's leading inorganic and organometallic chemistry journals.
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 Latest results of the Dixon group published in Nature
The results of collaborative research between the Dixon group and the groups of Amir Hoveyda and Nobel prize winner Richard Schrock have been published in Nature. The paper titled, ‘Synthesis of macrocyclic natural products by catalyst-controlled stereoselective ring-closing metathesis’ describes the first reliable, practical and general approach for the efficient and highly stereoselective synthesis of macrocyclic alkenes by catalytic ring-closing metathesis; transformations deliver up to 97% of the Z isomer owing to control induced by an air stable tungsten-based alkylidene catalyst. Utility is demonstrated through the stereoselective syntheses of macrocyclic natural products epothilone C and nakadomarin A.
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 The Wonders of Science
The Oxford Times has highlighted the department's International Year of Chemistry event in an article titled "The Wonders of Science". Fabrice Birembaut is pictured with the Lord Mayor of Oxford Elise Benjamin showing the science behind compounds as part of events to celebrate chemistry.
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 Hot article in Chem. Commun.
A recent paper based on work by Hassanatu Mansaray, Nick Phillips and Alex Rowe in the Aldridge group and carried out in the CRL has been selected as a hot article by Chem. Commun. The work probes the interactions between borane Lewis acids and arenes, through the synthesis of a dibromoborenium cation
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 Poster Prize
James Reeve, a DPhil student at the beginning of his third year from Harry Anderson's group, has been awarded a poster prize at the 10th international symposium on Functional pi-Electron Systems in Beijing. James’s poster was entitled the ‘Nonlinear Optical Tools for Neurophysiology’ and detailed the Anderson group's work towards imaging membrane potential using second harmonic generation.
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 Eisai Part 1 A Prizes
Our top second year students were honoured at the annual Eisai prize ceremony on Friday, 14 October. The prizes were awarded by Dr. Luis Castro, Head of Chemistry of the UK Discover NeuroScience Product Creation Unit, for outstanding performance in the Part IA exams. The winning students are Thomas Coxon (UNI), Tanatorn Khotavivattana (MER), Jerome Wicker (WOR), Christopher Sandford (MER). Congratulations for a truly outstanding performance. The Department is very grateful to Eisai for funding and supporting these prizes.
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 A paper in Science and one in PNAS within 24 hours
The Robinson group has reason to celebrate this week – Science and PNAS published papers from their group on the same day. ‘These two papers are the result of a lot of hard work over quite a period of time’ says Carol. ‘Both publications, in quite different ways, present major steps forward into new areas of research for us’.
Briefly the group succeeded in bringing intact ATPases into gas phase and investigated them with their customised mass spectrometers. These nanomotors are large macromolecules, which are very dynamic, heterogeneous and not readily soluble. All of these properties make them challenging to work with. Their results show how different parts of the motor interact and highlight the role of lipids within these assemblies. This led to the proposal of new modes of regulation (Science 2011 link)
For the second paper the group developed a new way to follow the assembly of a highly heterogeneous chaperone complex from its constituent proteins. The Hsp90 chaperone is activated under stress conditions, such as heat, and has been linked with many disease states including cancer. The ability to follow this assembly in real-time provided new molecular details and suggested a mechanism by which various complexes are regulated in the cellular environment. (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci USA link).
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 GlaxoSmithKline Prizes 2011
The GlaxoSmithKline prizes were presented to the award winners on Thursday 13 October. The GlaxoSmithKline Award in Organic Chemistry Part II was awarded to James Egleton (Supervisor, Dr Angela Russell).
This prize is awarded to the highest ranked Oxford graduate (based on their combined Part I and Part II performance) who continues into postgraduate research in the CRL in the same calendar year.
The GlaxoSmithKline 3rd Year Undergraduate Prizes in Practical Organic Chemistry were awarded to: Rebecca Cross, Daniel Finnemore and Kelvin Jackson.
These three prizes are awarded to 3rd year undergraduates who have shown excellence in their experimental work and written submission.
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 On the Cover of Journal of Molecular Biology
A pair of articles from the Benesch group and collaborators from the
University of Toronto have been highlighted on the front cover of the
Journal of Molecular Biology and in an associated commentary. These
back-to-back publications describe the structure and dynamics of
alphaB-crystallin, a protein associated with a variety of protein
misfolding disorders, including Alzheimer's Disease. Photography by Karl Harrison
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 Winners of MPLS Vacation Bursaries Poster Event
On the 5th of October, the division held its first Vacation Bursaries Poster Event bringing together all of the current EPSRC Vacation Bursaries awardees and other students in the division holding vacation bursary awards over the summer. The event provided a great opportunity for students to share their project work, foster networking and gain experience in presenting their work to others. The event was attended by Professor Nick Woodhouse (Acting Head of the MPLS Division), Professor Robert Taylor (Associate Head of the MPLS Division (Academic)) and Professor Tim Softley (Chairman of Chemistry and the outgoing Associate Head of the MPLS Division (Academic)) who were impressed by the high standard of all the work presented. A cash prize for the best project poster was awarded to Rosalyn Falconer (Chemistry) with Catrin Campbell-Moore (Mathematics) and William Coulton (Physics (Astrophysics)) sharing second prize.
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 Highlighted in Dutch Magazine for Physics
The Aarts and Dullens groups feature in the latest issue of the 'Nederlands
Tijdschrift voor Natuurkunde' (Dutch Magazine for Physics), having been
interviewed by the Magazine earlier this year. The Magazine portrays the
careers of Drs Aarts and Dullens, who met as undergraduates and studied
together for both their MSc and PhD degrees. After short postdocs in Paris
(Dr Aarts) and Stuttgart (Dr Dullens), they now continue to work together in
the Experimental Soft Matter Group at Oxford.
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