Green Chemistry @ MUN

Photo from CHHA-NL facebook page – link below

Hart Plommer (PhD candidate, Kerton group) with Kori Andrea (MSc candidate, Kerton group) organized a science camp for children in St. John’s.  The children had a fantastic time with lots of hands-on experiences. Hopefully, some are inspired to be future scientists. Thank you also to Karen Hattenhauer (Dept. of Chemistry) for advice and other volunteers from the green chemistry and catalysis group

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1092415530857948.1073741842.270813043018205&type=1&l=e74f1818a8

Congratulations to Yi who successfully defended her PhD thesis today

George, Erika and Kori are on their way back from the ACS Summer School (Boulder, Colorado). They had a great time learning about their field and made many new friends and connections. Thanks to the ACS for organizing and the ACS Petroleum Research Fund for sponsorship.

George and friends during poster session

Erika and Kori at their posters

Chris, Fran, Jen, Erika and Kori represented our team at the 100th CSC held in Toronto a couple of weeks ago. Chris and Fran were invited to talk as part of the “Frontiers in Controlled Polymerization” symposium and Kori received a travel award to participate in the Green Chemistry Crash Course and Industrial Case Study (organized by the UofT Green Chemistry Initiative with GreenCentre Canada). Thank you to the organizers for a wonderful conference both scientifically and socially. Also, thanks to the Blue Jays for being in town, which meant we got to check out some games at the Rogers Centre 🙂

The Memorial University Chemistry Society (MUNCS) hosted the region’s chemical conference this past weekend – over 140 chemists attended. Well done to all involved. Chris and Fran are especially proud of their group members who did an excellent job giving their talks and presenting their posters, and making sure that our visitors had a good time! More photographs from the conference can be found on the conference’s facebook page linked here

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Kata successfully defended her PhD thesis on chromium catalysts for CO2 and epoxide copolymerization. Many thanks to her examination committee: Mike Katz and Sunil Pansare (MUN) and Arjan Kleij (Tarragona).

A former BSc (Honours) student from the Kerton group Dr. Marcus Drover has been recognized as a 2017 Resnick Prize Postdoctoral Scholar for his current research at Caltech under the supervision of Prof. Jonas Peters.  Congratulations on all of your remarkable achievements Marcus!

Our University is the easternmost one in N.America. We are situated in ‘iceberg alley’ so our spring is a little bit later than elsewhere in Canada. However, we are treated to nature’s spectacle, which cannot be seen so easily anywhere else in the world. We are truly blessed to live, study and work in such a unique location.

Here are a couple of photos of the green chem profs this past Easter weekend.

Good luck in your exams everyone and have a wonderful summer of research and adventure.

Yi’s paper on transformations of our platform molecule 3A5AF, which can be obtained from N-Acetyl-D-Glucosamine (the monomer of chitin from crustacean shells), is available as an ASAP article in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. Congrats to all the students involved

Y. Liu, C. Staehler, J. N. Murphy, B. J. Furlong, and F. M. Kerton, “Formation of a renewable amine and an alcohol via transformations of 3-acetamido-5-acetylfuran”, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering,  Just Accepted Manuscript, DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b00323

Three of our graduate students will be participating in the ACS Summer School on Green Chemistry and Sustainable Energy 2017. They will be traveling to Colorado in June to explore scientific solutions to global sustainability challenges. Congratulations! We are sure you will enjoy this as much as all previous graduates of this world-class program and learning experience.