The 68th Irish Universities Chemistry Research Colloquium took place at Cork University on the 23-24th of June. As always the colloquium highlighted the outstanding research being conducted by the best and brightest of Ireland’s young chemists at third level institutions across Ireland. All students from the group who attended said it was a brilliant few days with lots of interesting research presented. Well done to Jinju James for her poster presentation.

Congratulations to Chris Nottingham who received the BOC gas award for his outstanding PhD research project. Chris delivered an excellent presentation entitled ‘Ferrocene based ligands & catalysts for asymmetric synthesis’.

Well done to the third year PhD students Cian Kingston, Andrea Zanetti, Kevin Gahan and Brian Fitzpatrick who all presented their research at the Dublin Chemistry Third Year Talks Day on the 31st of May hosted by Trinity College Dublin.

Well done to Dr. Christopher Nottingham on passing his PhD viva today!

Chris has made some terrific advances in his research and submitted his thesis entitled “A novel family of ferrocene-containing ligands for asymmetric catalysis and the rational design of a “privileged scaffold” mimic”.

Congratulations to Dr. Kieran Connole on passing his Viva!

Kieran worked on developing new axially chiral ligands and has submitted his thesis entitled “Synthesis, Resolution & Application of Electronically Varied Chiral P,N Ligands in Asymmetric Catalysis”.

Congratulations to Dr. Mark Jackson who has just passed his Viva!

Mark worked on Palladium catalysis for his PhD project and has submitted his thesis entitled “Development of Pd-Catalysis for the Asymmetric Synthesis of Tertiary & Quaternary alpha-Aryl Containing Oxindoles”.