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”.

Denise Moran and Catherine Tighe attended the French Medicinal Chemistry Society’s Young Research Fellows Meeting which took place in the School of Pharmacy in Lille. This three day conference featured talks from young researchers as well as plenary lectures from academic and industrial researchers with a focus on drug discovery and optimisation. Congratulations to Catherine Tighe who was awarded the SCT-ACS J. Med. Chem. Joint Award which will send her to the upcoming 252nd ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia.

The CSCB Symposium- ‘Recent Advances in Synthesis and Chemical Biology XIV’ took place on Friday 11th of December in RSCI. Brilliant talks were delivered by Professor Norio Shibata (Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan), Professor Nils Metzler-Nolte (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany), Professor Jane Clarke (University of Cambridge, UK), Professor Stephen Clarke (University of Glasgow, UK) and Professor Miquel Pericas (ICIQ, Tarragona, Spain) . Well done to all the group members who presented posters, particularly to Catherine Tighe who was awarded a prize for her poster. Thanks to all involved in the organisation of the day.