Green Chemistry @ MUN

Stephanie MacQuarrie (Cape Breton University) is an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemistry at Memorial University. Positions are available in her group in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Project titles are available below and full details are in the linked pdf file: Graduate Student Projects.

PROJECT 1: Controlled Grafting of Organic Catalyst Monomers within the Pore Walls of Large Pore Silica-Based Materials.

PROJECT 2: Entrapment of an Oligomeric Enzyme in Ultra Large Pore SBA-15 Generates Highly Stable Reusable Biocatalyst

PROJECT 3: Dipyrromethene Functionalized Mesoporous Silicas as Heavy Metal Sensors

Prof. Chris Kozak and Prof. Fran Kerton, and ten graduate students from the green chemistry and catalysis group are attending this exciting meeting. They are in Ottawa until Friday when Nobel prize winner Prof. Bob Grubbs will give a plenary lecture.

Green Chemists @ New Horizons, North America

Casa de la Universidad de California, Mexico City

An interval to watch Mexico play (& win) in the World Cup

Fran (North American New Horizons Fellow, 2014) spent June 21-24 at the New Horizons in Science Symposium in Mexico City organized by the Mexican Academy of Sciences, the US Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. It involved young-mid career scientists from a range of disciplines (from astrophysics to marine biology/oceanography) across North America. She is looking forwarding to meeting many of them again in the future and establishing new international collaborations.

This may be of interest to some group members and friends of the group: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/aquaculture/

Fran will be traveling to Mexico City soon to participate in the New Horizons symposium. This event will bring together early/mid-career scientists identified by the three main scientific bodies of Canada, USA and Mexico for potential future collaborations: http://rsc-src.ca/en/events/new-horizons-in-science  It is generously sponsored by the Mexican Academy of Sciences and US National Academy of Sciences.

More information and details to follow.

Coralee (BSc, Guelph) and Erika (BSc, Memorial) have joined the green chemistry & catalysis group this may to pursue their graduate studies. They will both be working on projects related to carbon dioxide activation. We wish them every success in their research and hope they enjoy their time in our group.

To celebrate the beginning of summer, the group will be having a potluck on Thursday lunchtime and also going to Bitters (graduate pub) at the end of the day

The Profs went out this weekend to see some of the icebergs that have made their way down to our locality. The pictures shown below were taken within a 20 minute drive from the University campus in St. John’s.

Yes – it is still fairly cold in St. John’s this time of year – our seasons are generally a month behind elsewhere in Canada!

Jenna’s March Catalysis Science & Technology blog post is now online. Epoxides can couple with carbon dioxide in the presence of aluminium(III) catalysts to give cyclic carbonates, which have a variety of uses in industry.

A single centre aluminium(III) catalyst and TBAB as an ionic organocatalyst for the homogeneous catalytic synthesis of styrene carbonate 
Somsak Supasitmongkol and Peter Styring
Catal. Sci. Technol. 2014, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C3CY01015E

This summer we are lucky to have four undergraduate students join our group for 16 weeks to gain valuable research experience. Congratulations to Rebecca O’Leary (McGill), Joshua Lehr (MUN), Nic Bouchard (Laval via ICE) and Christian Pearce (MUN).