Filed under: Chemistry Professors, Conferences, Group News, Group Photos, Science, Students
MUN profs and students at Science Atlantic ChemCon. Thank you MSVU for a great conference
We are all just back from travels in the Maritime provinces of Canada. The Profs (Chris Kozak and Fran Kerton) attended Science Atlantic ChemCon hosted by Mount Saint Vincent University – along with Mike Katz, Chris Flinn and many of our undergraduates. Memorial will be hosting next year – so do consider paying us a visit. Jen Murphy and Tim Anderson took part in the Canadian Chemical Crystallography Workshop also held in Halifax.
Then the big event followed – the 99th CSC in Halifax. Chris, Fran, Jen, Hart and Kaijie gave talks in the green chemistry symposium organized by Chris Kozak and Rob Singer. Tim, Kaijie and Hart also presented posters during the conference. Above are two photos from this conference. Jen Murphy and Kaijie Ni won talk/journal prizes from Green Chemistry and Catalysis Science & Technology. On our last night, we headed to the Halifax Ale House to celebrate our #ChemFam with honorary group member Dr. Louise Dawe from Wilfrid Laurier University.
Thank you UNB for hosting an epic ChemCon this year! We had so much fun and made many new friends. Congratulations to all group members on their talks and posters, with an extra special congrats to Jen Murphy on her Best Graduate Oral Presentation Prize. We are already looking forward to ChemCon 2016 at MSVU next year. Dr. Kozak is ready to be auctioned off to join another quiz team in aid of fundraising for ChemCon 2017 at MUN.
Green Chem & Cat Group at ChemCon 2015, UNB
The Green Chemistry and Catalysis Group at our graduate student recruiting booth. Nice pose, Dr. Kozak!
Our research group is busy trying to make fish and seafood waste into something else – hopefully one day we will turn it into something more valuable. Nowadays, when we have finished eating a shrimp or crab dish – the shells go into the trash and off to a landfill site. With space in landfills becoming less readily available, we can try to turn our waste into something else. In our case, this something else is a new chemical building block that we could turn into a new disease-fighting drug or into a new plastic. Chemicals are all around us in daily life (including the parts of this computer that I am using to write this blog post). To me it seems obvious to take one problem, waste, and to use it to solve another problem, making the objects we need and use everyday. In this way, we can all live a little bit more sustainably and take better care of our planet.
Dr. Kerton enjoying Singapore’s famous chili crab earlier this year – where did those shells go? probably to landfill
Dr. Kerton’s NSERC Discovery Grant has been renewed at $43000 per year for 5 years.
This grant will be used to partially pay the stipends of Yi Liu (PhD), Greg Curtis (MSc), George Margoutides (PhD), Hart Plomer (MSc) and Coralee Ridder (MSc). It is also used to contribute towards the stipends of the following co-supervised students: Jen Murphy (PhD with Hawboldt, Engineering), Valerie Parsons (MSc with Bottaro, Chemistry) and Shafaet Chowdhury (PhD with Kozak, Chemistry).
Thank you to all current and former students who helped produce the results during the last funding period, which allowed the grant to be renewed. Here’s hoping for lots of exciting results during this next 5 year period.
** Dr. Kerton has also received a ‘stopover in a commonwealth country’ travel grant from the RSC, which will cover some of the costs towards a diversion from Hong Kong to Singapore. She will be visiting Hong Kong to attend the Green Chemistry Gordon Research Conference and Singapore to collaborate with Prof. Ning Yan at the National University of Singapore.**
Filed under: Chemistry Professors, Group News, Science, Students | Tags: carbon dioxide, catalysis, Catalysis Science and Technology, Coordination Chemistry, Graduate Studies, green chemistry, Green polymers, Inorganic Chemistry, Publication, research, students
The RSC journal Catalysis Science and Technology has selected our paper on Cr-catalyzed CO2/epoxide copolymerization as a “Hot Article” for January. The paper describes work performed by Hua Chen during her M.Sc. studies with Dr. Kozak. Thank you Hua for your hard work on this paper and thanks to Louise Dawe, whose ninja-like crystallographic skills were vital to solving the structure of one of the catalysts discussed in the paper. Access to the article can be found here.
Dr. Kozak and Dr. Kerton have both had papers accepted during the holidays for a forthcoming special issue of the RSC journal Catalysis Science & Technology. This issue will focus on the important topic of conversion of carbon dioxide into value-added organics, which is guest edited by Arjan Kleij, a world leader in this area from the Institut Català d’Investigació Química, Tarragona, Spain.
Dr. Kerton is also a co-author on a paper published by Prof. Ning Yan at the National University of Singapore, which is about the direct conversion of chitin into a N-containing furan (3A5AF).
Congratulations to all the co-authors on these papers!
Dr. Kozak is looking forward to giving an invited lecture in the Transition Metal Complexes in Homogeneous Catalysis Symposium at the 2014 International Conference on Coordination Chemistry in Singapore.
Dr. Kerton is a member of the editorial board for the new journal Sustainable Chemical Processes.
Sustainable Chemical Processes is a peer reviewed open access journal covering both scientific and engineering aspects of sustainable approaches in chemistry. It is published by Chemistry Central, the sister company to Biomed Central. These are world-leading open access publishers.
Please consider publishing a paper in this wonderful new venture. Feel free to contact Dr. Kerton or anyone else associated with the journal if you have any questions.
Filed under: Chemistry Professors, Group News, Science, Students | Tags: carbon dioxide, news, publications, science, students
Fran, Nduka (PhD 2008-2013) and Jenna (PhD 2011-2015) wrote a short review article on copolymerization of carbon dioxide with epoxides late last year and early this year. It has been accepted for publication in a special issue of Dalton Transactions on the topic of “Advances in Metal-Catalysed Polymerisation and Related Transformations”. Although Aluminum catalysts are generally less-reactive than some state of the art catalysts for such reactions, there is significant scope to develop new systems based on this cheap metal. For example, Aluminum can catalyse many different types of polymerization reactions and so one could imagine preparing terpolymers (polymers made up of 3 different sub-units/monomers) or even more complex materials.
Here is a link to the article: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2013/dt/c3dt00049d
Graphical Abstract for Perspective on Al catalysts for carbon dioxide-epoxide copolymerizations
Chris and his research make an appearance in the president’s annual report/highlights. There is a link to the full report through today.mun.ca Congratulations to Chris on this honour (builidng on his Suncor Young Innovator award)
Green Chemistry @ MUN 