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Congratulations to the winner of the "Chemistry In Action" Art & Photography Competition, David Withall (PhD student in Challis group), for his entry "Chemically Synthesised Undecylprodigiosin".

David will receive a £50 Amazon Voucher from the Head of Department and Chair of the Welfare & Communications Committee, plus the artwork will soon be displayed prominently in the Department.

Thank you to all those who entered the competition, the final decision was very diffcult for the judging panel as there were so many interesting entries and the standard was very high. Well done David!

Visit for further details.

Congratulations to all our graduands, who are receiving their degrees today.

All staff, colleagues and friends from the Department look forward to this occasion and the opportunity to celebrate your achievements with you and your guests on such a memorable day.

We wish you well and many congratulations on your success!

For theory to make proper contact with experiment, we must average over a large number of geometrical configurations. For big metalloproteins like Type I copper plastocyanin and cucumber basic protein, generating the structures is too expensive for quantum chemistry. In contrast, the empirical ligand field molecular mechanics model invented by the Deeth group at Warwick can quickly generate the geometries required. Based on our structures, Nick Besley's group in Nottingham excise the active sites and use them to compute using high level QM methods the absorption and CD spectra. Agreement with experiment is impressive. See the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B:

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-Warwick 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 Warwick 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 Warwick 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.’