Greg Welch awarded NSERC doctoral prize

Greg Welch is one of the two NSERC Doctoral Prize recipients for 2009 in the category of Natural Sciences. These prestigious awards honour the achievements of Canada's most promising scientists and engineers, and are awarded annually to up to four doctoral students in sciences and engineering at Canadian universities. Greg Welch graduated in October 2008 with a doctoral degree in Chemistry under the supervision of Dr. Douglas Stephan. He is currently an NSERC Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Congratulations, Greg, on this great recognition!

Click here to see the posting on the graduate studies website.

Student success at the 2009 CSC conference!

Congratulations to the following students who won awards for their presentations and posters at the 92nd Canadian Society for Chemistry Conference in Hamilton, Ontario (May 30-June 3, 2009):

Ben Cooper (B.Sc. Hons, Mount Allison, 2

005)

Group : Dr. Macdonald
Poster Prize for Inorganic Graduate Competition
Poster: Low Oxidation State Indium Salts and their "Crowned" Complexes

V. Nicholas Vukotic (B.Sc. Hons, University of Windsor 2009)
Group: Dr. Loeb

Honorable Mention for Poster in Inorganic Graduate Competition as an Undergrad

Poster: Incorporating Dynamic Components into Solid State Materials

Sinisa Djurdjevic (Going into 4th year of Undergraduate Degree in Chemistry)

Group: Dr. Green
Poster Prize for Organic Undergraduate Competition

Poster: Nicholas Reaction Based Synthetic Approach to (-)-O-Methylandrobiphenyline and (-)-Allocolchicine

Hiyam Hamaed (third year Ph.D. candidate)
Group: Dr. Schurko
2nd prize in the graduate student competition of the Physical, Theoretical and Computational Division

Poster: "Application of 209Bi NMR to the structural characterization of Bismuth-containing materials"

Photo gallery: 59-410 research presentations

A photo gallery of pictures from the 59-410 research presentations on April 27 and 28, 2009 is available at:

http://picasaweb.google.ca/uwinchem/2009410Presentations?feat=directlink

This year, the top presentations were:
Nik Vukotic (Chemistry, Dennis Tuck Award)
Justin Renaud (Biochemistry, Cindy Hutnik Award)

Photo galleries: Chemistry at the Mall

New photo galleries for the Chemistry at the Mall event on April 23, 2009 are posted at:

http://picasaweb.google.ca/uwinchem/ChemistryAtTheMall?feat=directlink

Chemistry at the Mall was a public outreach event featuring graduate research posters, chemistry magic shows and "Meet the Faculty"!

For more information about this event, click here.

A new method for 14N NMR spectroscopy

Luke O'Dell and Rob Schurko have been investigating a new method of acquiring 14N NMR spectra in the solid state, and the work is described in J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2009, 131, 6658–6659, DOI: 10.1021/ja901278q. 14N NMR spectrosocpy is very difficult experiment to conduct on most solid-state samples, because 14N is a quadupolar nucleus, and most cases the 14N NMR patterns are hundreds of kHz to several MHz in breadth. The new method involves the use of special pulses called WURST pulses, which are capable of sweeping wide frequency ranges, along with the collection of long echo trains to further enhance the signal to noise. They have also reported that the swept pulses actually enhance the overall S/N of the spectrum, and have dubbed the method as "DEISM" (Direct Enhancement of Integer Spin Magnetization). You can read more about Rob Schurko's research group by clicking here.

Mango Party - May 28, 2009

Dr. Pandey's annual mango party will take place on Thursday, May 28 at 3 p.m. on the front steps of Essex Hall. Make sure you are there!!

NMR workshop, May 20 and 21

NMR Workshop Announcement:
On May 20 and 21 from 9:00 am until 12:00 p.m., the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry NMR Facility at the University of Windsor is offering a workshop entitled "An Introduction to Practical Aspects of NMR Data Acquisition and Processing".

This introductory workshop, which runs over two mornings, is geared toward incoming summer students and/or graduate students with little or no NMR experience, but who are expected to make use of the NMR spectrometers as part of their summer project. The workshop is meant as supplement to the "one on one" training that new students receive and will allow an opportunity to go into greater depth on many topics.

There will be mixture of lecture sessions and hands on learning opportunities for the participants. In addition to myself, Rob Schurko, Aaron Rossini and Hayam Hamaed will helping with the sessions. The topics covered include:

• Preparation of NMR Samples
• Set up of 1D 1H and 13C NMR Experiments
• Processing and Presentation of NMR Data

Click here to see the schedule and register for the workshop.

The workshop is free of charge to members of the Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry; however, enrollment is limited, so please register soon!