Category: Welcomes

Well the Green Materials Laboratory has yet another new member…

And although her tag may read “Tootsie”, this is not Dustin Hoffman’s dog. Callie is 2-year old rescued greyhound who joined our team from the Greyhound Rescue Fife organisation.

Two more inductees in our quest to take over the world with green plastic, public engagement and good beer: Paniz Pahalvanlu has joined us for the summer from the University of British Columbia (Canada). She’s working with Genny on some poly(depsipeptoid)s. Tatjana Daenzer has joined us as an Erasmus student from the University of Mainz (Germany). She’s working with Fern on derivatising some of Holger Frey’s intriguing junction-functionalised block copolymers. Welcome!

The air in Edinburgh is crisp and clean, jackets are being zipped up and the winds of change blow. Seasons always lend themselves to overly dramatic statements, as do new arrivals. This September marks a major change in the Green Materials Laboratory, with a full six new starters joining our team.

PhD-1. Genny Keefe has arrived from Canada. She worked in the Canadian arm of the GML for several years as an undergraduate and has now started her PhD supported by an NSERC scholarship. She’ll be working on anti-microbial polymers.

PhD-2. Fern Sinclair has stayed on after an undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh with a prestigious Principal’s Scholarship. She’s working on polymer functionalisation (pre and post!).

PhD-3. Emily MacDonald joins us after an undergraduate degree at the University of Manchester. She’ll be looking at some phosphorus-containing polymers of commercial importance.

PhD-4. Kailong (Kevin) Zhu has come all the way from China to join our team. He’s the lucky one, though, with THREE supervisors (myself, Stephen Thomas and Jason Love) helping him with his work on carbon dioxide catalysis.

PhD-5. David Ferrier is (gasp) an Engineer supervised by Philip Hands in the School of Engineering. He’s working with us on some novel swellable polymers for sensing applications.

MSc-1. Finally, Shuyu (Echo) Yang has also come to us from China and will look at epoxidised soybean oils.

Thanks so much to everyone who decided to join our team! Now get in the lab and make some magic happen! And have fun!

Chao Wei has joined our group for the next few months as a Masters project student. He’ll be working on expanding the monomer scope of our iron amine bis(phenolate) catalysts active in ATRP/OMRP. Chao is super keen to learn every detail of controlled radical polymerisation and has already gained quite a few nicknames after only a couple of weeks. My favourite is “Love Chao”!

Welcome LC!

Our glovebox has finally made it into our instrument room! After removing the door, the door jamb,  and then the entire door frame we got our glovebox into the right spot. Installation by MBraun tomorrow and then the fun really starts. With the Malvern triple detection GPC also up and running it’s like a second Christmas in the Green Materials Laboratory!

Note: Not a photo of the actual box.

A welcome is in order to Genny Keefe who will arrive in Edinburgh this evening. Genny is currently part of Team Canada, completing her Honour’s project at the University of Prince Edward Island working on the synthesis of new monomers for ring-opening polymerization. She’s coming over to Edinburgh to work out a few of the kinks in her project, have some in-depth scientific discussions about the progress of the work, and (maybe, time permitting) have a bit of fun in the UK.

Fun IS in order. The trip coincides with our group Christmas party (joint with Team Stephen Thomas), Genny’s birthday (December 12th) and Horrible Boss Shaver’s birthday (December 15th)!

Genny likes the Green Materials Laboratory so much that she’s actually decided to transition to Team Edinburgh full-time and will start a PhD here in September 2013 – so look out for a SECOND welcome post then!

Welcome, Team Edinburgh!

Laura Allan runs the show and is on some bizarre circular homecoming that took her from Edinburgh to Cheltenham to London to Warwick to Canada and back, which really isn’t a circle. She’s done an amazing job getting the lab up and running. Well done!

Jarret MacDonald finally got to use his passport and took an amazing journey from home to Iceland to London, through the Underground, onto a train, and then showed up looking shell-shocked at Waverley Train Station in central Edinburgh. We did the sensible thing: picked him up, took him to a pub and gave him a pint of Deuchars and a haggis, neeps and tatties pie. His irrational fear of beavers has been replaced by a completely rational fear of buses.

Science is challenging, exhilarating, time-consuming and disruptive. So is moving across the Atlantic. Dr. Shaver’s Green Materials Laboratory is transitioning from its previous home in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Prince Edward Island to its new home in the School of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. A new lab, new colleagues, new science, new students all focussed on creating some transformative polymeric materials.