Farewell to Dr Sara Miller
Congrats to Sara who is off to Flinders shortly. We all wish her well and anticipate a few collaborative projects ongoing :-).
Group photo after lunch to celebrate Sara’s time at Otago.
Marsden Funding Success: Hydrogen generation with sustainable resources – a combined molecular, computational and engineering approach
Marsden Funding Success
Congratulations to Keith Gordon (PI) and James Crowley (AI) on being awarded $941,000 by the Marsden Fund for their three-year project “Hydrogen generation with sustainable resources – a combined molecular, computational and engineering approach“. Also involved in the project are researchers from Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (Dr S Kupfer, Dr GE Shillito and Prof. W Weigand), Ulm University (Prof. D Ziegenbalg) and the University of Nottingham (Prof. MW George).
Abstract: Hydrogen is an important fuel source and commodity chemical used in a wide range of industrial processes. Unfortunately, almost all the hydrogen produced currently is obtained from the steam reforming process which is both energy intensive and generates carbon dioxide as a by-product. There are already several photocatalytic systems, including bimetallic metal complexes that can efficiently generate hydrogen in this way. However, the current technologies use Noble metals which are expensive and rare. They will use earth abundant transition metals such as iron, cobalt and copper by re-designing the photocatalytic systems.
The grant will fund three PhD stipends and related research costs.
For details of other Marsden Fund Awards to University of Otago PIs, see: Otago researchers secure almost $20m in Marsden Fund grants
Mitchell talks at ICAVS
Mitchell Chalmers recently spoke at International Conference on Advanced Vibrational Spectroscopy (ICAVS12) held in Krakow, Poland, from 27th August – 1st September 2023. His talk was entitled “Discriminating microcalcifications immersed under varying depths of wax” and described work around the detection of materials embedded in wax structures.
Sam attends ISPPCC
2. Daniel G. Nocera, Accounts of Chemical Research 2012, 45 (5), 767-776.
New paper in Inorganic Chemistry
Congratulations to Joe, Georgina, Nigel Lucas, Jordan Smith, Sara and Keith on their recent publication in Inorganic Chemistry 2023, 62, 11028–11036 entitled “Exploring the Excited States of a Hexa-peri-hexabenzocoronene-Substituted Dipyridophenazine Ligand and Its Metal Complexes”. The paper describes the synthesis and characterization of hexa-peri -hexabenzocoronene (HBC)-substituted dipyridophenazine (dppz) ligand (dppz-HBC) and its corresponding rhenium [Re(CO)3Cl] and ruthenium [Ru(bpy)2]2+ complexes were synthesized and characterized.
New paper in Meat Science
Congratulations to Chima, Sara and Ketih for their recent publication in Meat Science 195 (2023) 109005 entitled “Fusion of three spectroscopic techniques for prediction of fatty acid in processed lamb”. The paper describes how data fusion may be used to obtain fatty acid profiles in a superior fashion to a single technique. Importantly one could examine meat in a variety of presentations including ground (coarse and fine as well as whole tissue). The work was a collaboration with AgResearch, notably Wendy Bain, Cameron Craigie, Talia Hicks and Mark Loeffen.
New publication in Pharmaceutics
Congratulations to Sara, Karlis, Joshua and Keith on their recent publication in Pharmaceutics 2023, 15, 1968 (https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics15071968). Their paper “In Situ Monitoring of Drug Precipitation from Digesting Lipid Formulations Using Low-Frequency Raman Scattering Spectroscopy” with Ben Boyd and Malinda Salim (Monash) describes the use of low frequency Raman spectra as an approach to probe drug precipitation from a lipid-based drug delivery system (medium-chain self-nanoemulsifying drug delivery systems).
Keith gives an invited talk at ICAVS
Keith attended the International Conference on Advanced Vibrational Spectroscopy (ICAVS12) held in Krakow, Poland, from 27th August – 1st September 2023 where he gave an invited talk entitled “Probing chemical speciation with low-frequency Raman spectroscopy” based around the work of the group describes in publications such as Pharmaceutics 2023 , 15 , 1526 (https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics15051526 ), Cryst. Growth Des. 2022, 22, 2946−2953 (https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.cgd.1c01401 ) and Cryst. Growth Des. 2022, 22, 2733−2741 (https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.cgd.2c00121 ).
Photo shows the main theatre with this amazing Periodic Table
Sam presents at ICAVS
Sam Harris attended the International Conference on Advanced Vibrational Spectroscopy (ICAVS12) held in Krakow, Poland, from 27th August – 1st September 2023 where he presented his work on “Systematic Tuning of Electronic Ground and Excited States in Donor-Acceptor Dyes; Steps Towards Designer Compounds for Modern Technologies” (based on his paper J. Phys. Chem. A, 2023, 127, 5312-5323 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.3c00671) as a poster.
MJ presents at Dodd Walls Symposium
MJ presented her poster at the Dodd-Walls Conference 2023 (12-16 June) 2023 entitled “Laboratory Demonstration on Vibrational Spectroscopy and
Chemometrics for Differentiating Solid Samples” where she described a new set of undergraduate experiments using spectroscopy and multivariate analysis.
