Green Chemistry @ MUN

Courtney’s latest School of Graduate Studies blog post is up. It provides an update on her life as a graduate student at Memorial so far. It is great to know that she is enjoying her courses and has a great support network in place 🙂  Courtney is working on collaborative research supervised by Chris Kozak, Fran Kerton and Kelly Hawboldt.

This semester the Green Chemistry & Catalysis Group welcomes Emily and Dakshita to their midst. Emily is working with Tim Anderson (Kozak Group) and Dakshita is working with Kori Andrea and Hart Plommer (both in the Kerton Group). We wish them every success in their research and hope they find the experience enjoyable.

Congratulations Dr. Ali Elkurtehi (Kerton group) who successfully defended his PhD thesis on Vanadium and Manganese Complexes as Catalysts in Oxidation and Carboxylation Reactions this morning. We all wish Ali lots of luck in his future career and look forward to celebrating with him next week over coffee and cake 🙂

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Congratulations Dr. Kaijie Ni (Kozak group) who successfully defended his PhD thesis on Chromium Catalysts for Carbon Dioxide-Epoxide Copolymerizations this past Friday. Also, thank you to all group members and friends who came out to celebrate with Kaijie on Saturday January 13th. We all wish Kaijie lots of luck for his postdoctoral research at Western University with Prof. Paul Ragogna.

Dr. Ni with Dr. Kozak

George Margoutidis (PhD candidate, Kerton group) is the lead author on a paper recently published by ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering: DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02870

In this work, chitin, a natural polymer from shrimp shells, can be broken down into smaller, water-soluble, biologically active molecules including sugars without heat or solvents using a technique called ‘mechanocatalysis’

Valerie Parsons (Former Kerton & Bottaro co-supervised MSc student) is a co-author on this paper due to her help in developing the separation-free ‘green’ analytical method used to characterize the molecules that George was able to make.

TOC ENTRY

Seasons Greetings: From our research group to yours, with representatives from across Canada (B.C. to NL) and the world (China, Greece, St. Lucia, Brazil and UK)

This week has been a busy one in the group. Erika Butler (Kozak group) gave an excellent departmental seminar, and Kori Andrea & Jennifer Murphy (Kerton group) organized and hosted a Trivia night at Bitters (the Graduate Pub at MUN). Well done everyone!

This semester we have Tyler Brown (Honours research with Kozak), Emily Robson (MUCEP 40 h with Kozak) and Ryan Warren (MUCEP 40 h with Kerton and Plommer) as part of our team. We hope you have a successful time in the lab and learn lots of new skills and science 🙂

We had a wonderful time last weekend at the Lighthouse picnics in Ferryland.

Here is a little video of our day 🙂

Dr.s Kerton and Kozak met with the Hon. Jim Carr (Minister of Natural Resources) with other scientists, engineers and graduate students on the St. John’s campus last week. They took part in an animated discussion on Canada’s energy future and in particular how the province is positioned in terms of clean energy projects. Dr. Kozak and our collaborator Dr. Hawboldt brought attention to our own research and the potential of bio-products and bio-fuels. Dr. Kerton highlighted the importance of energy conservation which could include lower energy chemical processes using catalysts, or new light-weight biomaterials and composites for use as insulation and in transit.