ÌÇÐÄTV

The 11^th International Conference on Materials Chemistry (MC11) is being hosted by the Department of Chemistry this week (8-11^th July). Monday 8^th July saw the visit of two Nobel Laureates in Chemistry. Professor Dan Shechtman, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology (Nobel Prize 2011) and Professor Sir Harry Kroto FRS, Florida State University, (Nobel Prize 1996) each gave a lecture to an audience of over 500 delegates from around the world.

An inter-university collaboration between the Costantini, Jones, Bonifazi (Namur) and de Vita (King’s College) groups showed the role of deprotonation on the two dimensional assembly of novel borazine compounds on a copper substrate. The results are published in .

Chemistry hires three new Professors in the areas of Sustainable Chemistry and Polymers as part of the Monash-ÌÇÐÄTV Strategic Research Alliance.

Adam Lee, Sebastien Perrier and Tom Davis are all joining the Department over the coming months.

The full details can be found at:-

The Gibson Group has been highlighted in a recent edition of Chemistry World - The Royal Society of Chemistry's Monthly Magazine. As part of a special article on how life survives in extreme enviroments, Dr Gibson was interviewed to discuss his team's work on polymeric mimics of antifreeze (glyco)proteins. These proteins enable fish to survive in polar oceans and synthetic mimics hold great promise in biotechnology.

Follow us on twitter @LabGibson

Collaboration between the Costantini and Wills groups investigates the dissociation of a newly synthesised, novel chiral ester on metallic substrates. The products of dissociation are directly imaged by scanning tunnelling microscopy allowing for the delineation of the cleavage mechanism as seen in .

The Gibson group have undertaken a detailed study into the ability of synthetic polymers to inhibit the growth of ice crystals - this is a fundmental process of incredible importance in biology (survival of extremophiles), medicine (cryoprotectection of cells/organs) and industry (preventing ice-induced damage). are pioneering the use of polymers as alternative to antifreeze proteins - Nature's cryoprotectants, using a combination of chemical, analytical, biological and computational methods

Read their latest paper here, in collaboration with R. Notman (CSC):

Dr Gareth Roberts, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department has been appointed as a Ramsay Memorial Fellow to be held in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol. These fellowships are awarded to advanced students of chemical research who have shown outstanding merit. His proposed research will entail studying the ultrafast photoprotection mechanisms at work in DNA base-pairs. Congratulations Gareth!

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 ÌÇÐÄTV to prepare electrodes while the rest of the group, usually four children, went to old car manufacturing site like Jaguar (Brown’s 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:

‘I feel the project run by Prof Pat Unwin and his staff was a huge success. It raised the pupils’ 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 ÌÇÐÄTV 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.’

The low pressure-CVD growth of graphene on low-cost Cu foil and its resulting electronic properties has been reported by the Costantini Group in Nano Research, in collaboration with the Department of Physics, the University of St. Andrews and the ELLETRA synchrotron. In the long-term, commercialisation of graphene will require economical techniques for its fabrication on a large scale. Therefore, its growth under low-pressure conditions on low-cost polycrystalline Cu foils represents a strong step towards a number of graphene applications. Angle-resolved photoemission measurements demonstrate a weak electronic coupling between the graphene and Cu, suggesting only a weak interaction with the substrate. In contrast, during the growth process, the graphene induces interfacial reconstruction of the mostly (100) surface, forming (n10) facets that in turn further modify the growth dynamics. Consequently, two main preferred graphene orientations with respect to the Cu are found, which is shown to be a consequence of a mismatch epitaxy. Further details can be read at .

Ada Della Pia and Giovanni Costantini publish the Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy chapter for the Springer Surface Science Techniques book, Gianangelo Bracco and Bodil Holst (ed).

The publishes in Biomaterials Science on why certain (macro)molecules are capable of inhibiting ice crystal growth, inspired by antifeeze proteins.

The work, conducted in collaboration with ÌÇÐÄTV Medical School provides insights into which structural features are essential for a (macro)molecule to inhibit ice crystal growth and why apparently similar compounds have opposing activity.

The ability to control ice crystal growth is a major technological challenge (anyone stuck at Heathrow or scraping their car...?) with many biotechnological applications.