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.
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.
Filed under: Science
Can. J. Chem. announces new Best Paper Award | Inorganic Division.
Jenna (PhD candidate, Kerton group) is contributing pieces to the RSC journal blogs. Today, her short summary of North’s paper on novel Al complexes for carbon dioxide activation was published. You can find it 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!
Kata (Kozak group) and Greg (Kerton group) had an awesome experience last week at the ACS Summer School on Green Chemistry and Sustainable energy in Golden, Colorado.
Here are a couple of photos:
Just a short post to say hello and welcome to the group to our WISE SSEP students. We hope you enjoy your time in our group and also all the other fun activities and friendship that WISE SSEP involves. Have a great summer!
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.
Green Chemistry @ MUN 