Chemistry News

Selected news articles from Chemistry

2012

Research Highlight: Work from Dr Martin Paterson has been published in the new flagship journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Chemical Science. The paper, “Comparing the ultraviolet photostability of azole chromophores” is a joint experimental/theoretical study of the photostability mechanisms in some nitrogenic heterocycles. This work shows how nature has chosen certain chromophores over others as these can convert and dissipate electronic energy from UV light to thermal energy and photoprotect biochemical molecules.

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Student Highlight: Congratulations to MChem student Robyn Fairbairn who won a prize for her presentation at the 2012 SCI Scottish Undergraduate Research Symposium.Robyn's presentation was based on her undergraduate MChem research project investigating heteroatom-bridged calixarenes as cluster supports.

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Major grant success: A grant from the EPSRC has been awarded to Dr Martin Paterson in collaboration with Dr Vas Stavros (Warwick). The Heriot-Watt share is £70k. The grant is for 3 years, “Towards Excited State Dynamics in Nucleosides”, and is a joint experimental/theoretical study involving ultrafast laser spectroscopy and non-adiabatic quantum chemistry, to study the photostability mechanisms in the building blocks of life.

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Major grant success: A grant from the EPSRC has been awarded to Dr Martin Paterson in collaboration with Prof. Ian Galbraith (HWU Physics), and Prof. Ifor Samuel (St Andrews Physics). The Heriot-Watt share is for £439k for 3 years and is titled “The Influence of Excited State Physics in Conjugated Polymer Devices”. The project will involve the use of non-linear response theory to model the electronic structure, and relaxation processes occurring in the important new class of optoelectronic devices built from conjugated organic materials.

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Major grant success: A grant from the EPSRC has been awarded to Prof. Stuart Macgregor in collaboration with Prof. Mike Whittlesey at the University of Bath. The grant is for £297k for 3 years and is titled “Catalytic Functionalisation of Aromatic Fluorocarbons”. The project is based on the observation of an usual regioselectivity in a hydrodefluorination reaction and aims to design new catalysts for the selective defluorination of flurooaromatics. For details click here

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Research Highlight: Work from Dr Martin Paterson and PhD student Therese Bergendahl has been published in the 2012 special issue of Chemical Communications highlighting emerging investigators. This theoretical work showed how subtle changes to the core aromatic electronic structure of porphycene macrocycles can greatly enhance their two-photon absorption properties, which have high potential in optical photodynamic anti-cancer treatments. (DOI: 10.1039/C1CC14332H)

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2011

Student Highlight: Congratulations to third year undergraduate James Sanderson who has been selected for an AstraZeneca Research Bursary for the duration of his degree. James will spend a placement year at AstraZeneca from summer 2012 as part of his MChem Chemistry with Industrial Experience degree at Heriot-Watt.

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Research Highlight: A recent publication by Scott Dalgarno and Euan Brechin in Chemical Communications has reported the formation of calixarene-supported rare earth octahedra and has been highlighted in ACS Noteworthy Chemistry. For more information click here.

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Major grant success: A grant from the EPSRC has been awarded to Dr Martin Paterson (PI) and Dr Magnus Bebbington (Co-I). The grant is for £476k for 3 years and is titled, “New Porphycene Macrocycles for Applications in Two-Photon Absorption: Optimisation and Synthesis”.

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Research Highlight: Is Electronegativity a Useful Descriptor for the Pseudo-Alkali Metal NH4? Alexander Whiteside, a PhD student working under supervision of Prof. Maciej Gutowski, addressed this question in a collaborative project with Dr. Sotiris Xantheas from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They computed properties of ammonium’s binary complexes with astatine and of selected borohydrides and confirmed the similarity of NH­4 to the alkali metal atoms. Even though ammonium is isoelectronic with sodium, its electronegativity is most similar to potassium, while the ionic radius to rubidium. They have paid particular attention to the molecular properties of ammonium (angular anisotropy, geometric relaxation, and reactivity), which can cause deviations from the behaviour expected of a conceptual “true alkali metal” with this electronegativity. 'This work opens up the opportunity to developing a comprehensive view on other pseudo-alkali metal species, pseudo-halogens and other pseudo-atoms' says Alexander Boldyrev of Utah State University. The results were published in Chem. Eur. J., 2011, DOI: 10.1002/chem.201101949 and highlighted in RSC Chemistry World.

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Grant success: Electronic Energy Quenching via Non-Adiabatic Pathways. Dr Martin Paterson has been awarded a 3 year grant from the Leverhulme Trust with a value of £140k.

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Research Highlight: Dalton Transactions 'Hot Article'. The Heteroborane and Computational Chemistry research groups, in collaboration with colleagues at the universities of Edinburgh and Salford, have recently described the molecular structures of 1,2-closo-P₂B₁₀H₁₀ (1) and 1,2-closo-As₂B₁₀H₁₀ (2) by gas electron diffraction and compared the results obtained with those from computation at the MP2/6-31G** level of theory. The first examples of metalladiphosphaboranes and a considerable extension of the range of known metalladiarsaboranes are also reported, these compounds being prepared from deboronated derivatives of 1 and 2, respectively. See R. McLellan, N. M. Boag, K. Dodds, D. Ellis, S. A. Macgregor, D. McKay, S. L. Masters, R. Noble-Eddy, N. P. Platt, D. W. H. Rankin, H. E. Robertson, G. M. Rosair and A. J. Welch, Dalton Trans., 2011, 40, 7181.

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Research Highlight: Dr Ai-Lan Lee’s Chemical Communications paper on "Gold(I) "Click" 1,2,3-Triazolylidenes: Synthesis, Self-assembly and Catalysis" in collaboration with Dr James Crowley at University of Otago, has been featured as one of the Gold 100 Article Collection by RSC and the World Gold Council to celebrate gold’s role in science and technology in the International Year of Chemistry.

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LASSIE in Brussels: LASSIE, the large European network coordinated by Prof. Martin McCoustra is participating in a large public engagement event with the European Commission and European Parliament in Brussels (see here). The event will include the Stars ‘r’ Us! exhibit. LASSIE focuses on the investigation into whether life began due to complex organic molecules being manufactured in the freezing centres of interstellar clouds. Professor McCoustra works alongside astronomers and astrophysicists from 13 higher education institutes based across Europe, including Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands. 

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Congratulations to the prize winners from MChem day 2010-2011: Four prizes were given to the winners (2 x poster and 2 x presentation) as voted for by the students. Winners pictured with Prof. Stuart Macgregor and Prof. Ken McKendrick.

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Congratulations to Prof. Ken McKendrick upon his election to a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). The new Fellows were elected after a rigorous four-stage selection process culminating in a ballot of the entire Fellowship. Each of the RSE Fellows will be encouraged to contribute to the aims and objectives of the Society, including the provision of expert policy advice to Government and Parliament, outreach education programmes for young people, public engagement events such as conferences and discussion forums, and working on the selection panels for research and enterprise Fellowships. Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, the President of the RSE commented: “I am delighted to be able to announce the new intake of Fellows – each has achieved excellence in his or her field of work, which has been recognised by their peers through their election to the RSE.”

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Chemical Communications Emerging Investigator Lectureship for Scott Dalgarno: The Editorial Board of Chemical Communications (Royal Society of Chemistry) have chosen Dr. Scott Dalgarno to be the first recipient of this new award in 2011 'for contributions to supramolecular chemistry, in particular the assembly and properties of calixarenes'. The award involves a lecture tour of China in September this year, with presentations at ISACS6 (Challenges in Organic Materials & Supramolecular Chemistry) in Beijing, the 2011Chemical Science Symposium in Nanjing and Zhejiang University.

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Research Highlight: A combinatorial-computational tool for finding the most stable conformers. Sanliang Ling, a PhD student working under supervision of Prof. Maciej Gutowski, developed a combinatorial-computational method for finding the most stable molecular conformers. A user specifies which bonds will be rotated and with which increments and a library of initial structures is automatically created. Next, the “fitness” level of each member of the library is probed using a theoretical model selected by the user. The tool SSC (Systematic Screening of Conformers) is available at http://sscf.sf.net and the paper, published in the Journal of Computational Chemistry was highlighted in a front cover feature.

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Research Highlight: Dalton Transactions 'Hot Article'. The Heteroborane and Computational Chemistry research groups, together with the Spectroelectrochemistry group at the University of Siena, Italy, have recently collaborated on a project in which new icosahedral carboranes bearing strongly electron-withdrawing fluorinated aryl substituents were prepared and studied. Judicious choice of substituent allows control of the reduction potentials of these molecules (figure) allowing us to identify which carboranes should afford the most stable (with respect to oxidation) reduced derivatives, which is of potential importance in the synthesis of supraicosahedral species. See H. Tricas, M. Colon, D. Ellis, S. A. Macgregor, D. McKay, G. M. Rosair, A. J. Welch, I. V. Glukhov, F. Rossi, F. Laschi and P. Zanello, Dalton Trans., 2011, 40, 4200.

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Research Highlight: Prof. Ken McKendrick, in collaboration with a group at Sandia National Lab, Livermore, CA, has published a paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics that has been selected as a ‘research highlight’ by the Editor, and also ranked amongst the top-20 downloaded papers for March. The work, carried out during exchange visits to Sandia, focuses on‘Direct angle-resolved measurements of collision dynamics with electronically excited molecules: NO(A2S+) + Ar’. See J. J. Kay, G. Paterson, M. L. Costen, K. E. Strecker, K. G. McKendrick and D. W. Chandler, J. Chem. Phys., 134, 091101 (2011).

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Grant success: Calixarenes: Metal-Organic Frameworks and Discrete Superstructures. Dr. Scott Dalgarno has been awarded a grant by EPSRC to study the formation of discrete and polymeric structures using nanometre scale building blocks. The project is in collaboration with Prof. Euan K. Brechin at the University of Edinburgh and Prof. Andrew I. Cooper at the Centre for Materials Discovery (University of Liverpool) and has a total value of £376k.

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Research Highlight: Prof. Ken McKendrick has published an invited perspective article and accompanying 'perspectives video' in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The article discusses the use of reactive projectiles to probe liquid surfaces. See C. Waring, P. A. J. Bagot, M. L. Costen and K. G. McKendrick, J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2011, 2, 12–18.

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See Chemistry news archive for more information about older news.