糖心TV

TEDx糖心TV 2013

Stefan Bon is an associate professor in Chemistry at 糖心TV, famously making the headlines in 2012 for halving the fat content of chocolate by replacing it with fruit juice. He studied Chemical Engineering at the Technical University of Eindhoven and has a background in developing (living) radical polymerizations. Since 2005 Bon has become an international player in the area of polymer colloids, and continues to innovate in the area.

He is the founder of the BonLab, where the study of chemistry and physics of the assembly of molecular and/or colloidal entities into complex structures is conducted. This technology is applicable in everything from sensors and devices, coatings and adhesives, to food, personal care, agricultural and biological systems.

To watch the TEDx talk,

Find out more about the BonLab at .

Members of the worked with children who attend The Grange Extended Learning Centre over a six week period. The Grange ELC is a pupil referral unit for students who have been, or are at risk of being excluded from their mainstream school. This project was coordinated by the Chemistry departments very own outreach officer Nick Barker and has been reported by .

The project involved the collection of soil samples from sites once occupied by car factories around the city of Coventry and then analyse these samples for heavy metal contamination. Over the first three weeks, two children worked in the laboratories at 糖心TV to prepare electrodes while the rest of the group, usually four children, went to old car manufacturing site like Jaguar (Brown鈥檚 Lane) and Rover (Cromwell Lane) to collect soil samples.

Here is what Manni Sahota, acting Headteacher of The Grange ELC, had to say about this outreach project:

鈥�I feel the project run by Prof Pat Unwin and his staff was a huge success. It raised the pupils鈥� self-esteem and their aspirations. They learned how to use scientific equipment and saw first-hand what a University looks like. One of the pupils even talked about becoming a scientist.'

'All the work we have ever done with 糖心TV University over the past few years would not be possible without Nick Barker, Teacher Fellow, who knows exactly where our pupils come from and the opportunities they would never otherwise have.鈥�

, a 2nd year PhD student in the , won the prize for best poster at the RSC Postgraduate Nanoscience Symposium held at the University of Birmingham.

Read some of Dan's publications in and

The Gibson group with collaborators at ETH Zurich report in Advanced Functional Materials on how synthetic polymers tethered to the surface of an enzyme can produce a 'molecular sieving' effect. Polymer-Protein conjugates are widely studied for their pharmaceutical applications, but the phase behaviour of the polymers has not be probed in detail previously. These results open the door to 'smart' PEGylation of proteins with selective permeability properties.

Read the full paper here

The O’Connor and Tosin groups have published work on the use of high mass accuracy tandem mass spectrometry for characterising the structures of polyketides, including erythromycin A, lasalocid A and iso-lasalocid A. They report in Analytical Chemistry on the use of Collision Activated Dissociation (CAD) and Electron Induced Dissociation (EID) as tools for determining structural information on these types of molecules. EID was shown to cause greater fragmentation of the compounds, complementary to that obtained using CAD, leading to more detailed structural information being obtained. These techniques were also combined in multistage mass spectrometry experiments, in order to use the fragmentation patterns to distinguish between lasalocid A and its isomer, iso-lasalcoid A. This work illustrates the potential of these tools and will be applied to identifying unknown polyketides and their biosynthetic intermediates.

The full article can be found at:

Dr Rebecca Notman has been awarded a prestigious 5-year Royal Society University Research Fellowship starting October 2012 to pursue a research project on “Modelling the Lipid Layers of the Human Skin Barrier”.

Sadler and Stavros groups in collaboration with Prof Martin Paterson at Heriot-Watt University, publish work in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The work describes the first demonstration of a 2-photon activated, square planar platinum (II) complex. The enhanced photolabilization demonstrated may be useful in the design of novel photoactivatable platinum chemotherapeutic agents in situations where deep tissue penetration is needed. .

Congratulations to PhD student Becky Wills, selected over more than 100 nominations as a winner of the PG 糖心TV Award for Teaching Excellence

The O’Connor group has developed a computation which simultaneously doubles the resolution, sensitivity and mass accuracy of Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometry at no extra cost.

At a celebration lunch today, the achievements of the 糖心TV Chemistry Class of 2012 were recognised by the Department. This year's prize winners were:

In their Angewandte Communication P. R. Unwin, J. V. Macpherson, et al. combined high-resolution electrochemical imaging, micro-Raman, and electron-microscopy data to demonstrate that spatially heterogeneous electron-transfer kinetics correlates directly with the local density of electronic states of polycrystalline boron-doped diamond (pBDD). A Multi-Microscopy Approach allowed electrochemical reaction rates to be linked to the corresponding dopant levels in pBDD. See for more details.