Green Chemistry @ MUN

REMINDER: Undergraduate Deadline for OISRA Awards is May 14 2015 at 4pm

Are you in the process of selecting undergraduate students to work in your lab for the 2015-2016 academic year?

If your research is oceans-related, your student(s) may be eligible to receive funding from the Research & Development Corporation’s (RDC’s) Ocean Industries Student Research Awards (OISRA).

Students can receive up to $7,500 with additional supervisory funding of $1,500 to support the student’s research costs.

Most undergraduate OISRA awardees have gone on to pursue graduate research at Memorial University.  Some students have even received a second OISRA award at the graduate level.

Undergraduate Award Structure and Level of Support:

Bachelors

Up to $7,500/award for full-time students in their third year of studies or later in a bachelor degree program that are interested in pursuing supervised research in a field related to ocean industries.

Eligibility requirements.

Students must have a minimum average of 75% and be enrolled full-time in the third or fourth year of their program in September 2015. The deadline for students to apply is May 14, 2015 at 4pm.

We’re here to help.

Interested and eligible students may contact RDC’s account managers, Andrew Simmons Andrewesimmons@rdc.org or Lynette Peddle lynettepeddle@rdc.org  for more information.

RDC’s OISRA program information is available on the following page:

http://rdc.org/research_awards/index.htm

Find the guidelines here http://rdc.org/research_awards/2015/oisra_guidelines_2015.pdf

Yi Liu (PhD candidate, Kerton group) is travelling to Toronto in May to attend the “Next Steps in Green Chemistry Research” student workshop, which is organized by the Green Chemistry Initiative.

She has just heard that she will receive a Travel Scholarship from the organizers. Congratulations Yi and thank you to the Green Chemistry Initiative and the workshop sponsors.

We wish Yi a safe journey and an enjoyable and productive workshop 🙂

The Green Chemistry and Catalysis Group is delighted to hear that Erika Butler (M.Sc. candidate in the Kozak group) has been awarded a prestigious NSERC CGS-M scholarship for her graduate studies in catalysis using non-precious metal complexes. Well done Erika!

Erika poses with her award letter in front of “Beyonce” the MBraun glove box.

Chris, Jen and Ken visited the Ocean Sciences Centre this week to check out some analytical instrumentation in their facilities (i.e. their Perkin Elmer 2400 C, H, N combustion elemental analyzer) that we will be using. We also took time to visit some of the residents of the facility, including their seals who were out for a swim enjoying the sunny weather.

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A paper on work conducted by Kata Devaine-Pressing (PhD candidate) and two former undergraduate research students (Josh Lehr and Michelle Pratt) is available as an accepted pre-proof manuscript. We are grateful to our excellent crystallographic collaborators, Amy Sarjeant (Northwestern U.) and Louise Dawe (Wilfrid Laurier U.) for their work on this paper. The manuscript can be accessed via this link: Dalton Transactions, 2015, DOI: 10.1039/C5DT00236B

As Fran is a member of the editorial board, she would like to promote this journal to visitors of our group website.  Please go and have a look.

There are several themed issues planned. Fran will be submitting an article to one on ‘Green Solvents’.  Others are planned including biorefineries, http://www.sustainablechemicalprocesses.com/about/update/biorefinerysustainableworld and magnetic nanomaterials.  If you want more information of the submission process or any themed issues, please contact Fran, and she will direct you to the right person or answer your query herself.

The journal is now being indexed in Chemical Abstracts and hopefully soon it will be indexed elsewhere too.  Below are the aims and scopes of the journal.

Fran provided the soapbox piece for January’s sea technology magazine. You can find it here: http://seatechnology.com/news/archives/2015/soapbox/soapbox0115.php

Yi Liu (PhD student, Kerton group) will soon see some of her work in press in RSC Advances – this work is in collaboration with Professor Ning Yan and his student Chen Xi at NUS. Dr. Kerton visited them last summer to discuss this research in person.

Research from Hart’s first year as a graduate student at MUN has been accepted for publication in Dalton Transactions and is available as an accepted manuscript (pre-proof) via the following link: Dalton Transactions, 2015, DOI: 10.1039/C5DT00220F

Congratulations to Immanuel too. He contributed to this work during his time here as a DAAD RISE Worldwide student/intern last summer.

Sometimes it can seem that chemistry graduate students find it difficult to find permanent positions in a chemistry-related field in industry….especially when you are in the process of applying for jobs.

We are delighted to say that Hassan Kalviri (PhD, 2011, Kerton Group) and Khaled Omari (PhD, 2012, Kerton Group) have obtained excellent jobs. Hassan is a senior chemist at a natural products company. Khaled will be finishing his NSERC visiting-fellowship with Agriculture and Agrifood Canada soon and will become a laboratory supervisor for an analytical chemistry company. Congratulations. We are proud of you!