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Students walk in front of teal wall

Spring has passed in 2022 and, with it, the incredible researchers in our department have also decorated the halls with achievements and awards. Here is a rundown of some of our early career researchers and their awards.

Srijit Seal

PhD student Srijit Seal attended the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) 2022 Conference in Dublin and won a student poster prize. Srijit is studying drug discovery using machine learning techniques to investigate chemical structures and their relationship to biological activity in the Bender group.

“It was thanks to the award from the Tony B Academic Travel Award from SLAS and the Royal Society of Chemistry Researcher Development Grant that helped me attend this conference,” says Srijit. “I am very grateful to receive the Student Poster Award at SLAS Europe 2022. I had a lot of interesting conversations on using cell morphology data and I am excited to continue working on improving explainable AI methods for biological interpretation.”

“Our work shows that using chemical structure along with cell morphology and gene expression can greatly improve model performance and detect mitochondrial toxicity. We are using methods that can best integrate these data sources and learn much more than the training data - a process we call as expanding the applicability domain of a machine learning model.”

Dr Carla Casadevall

Dr Carla Casadevall, a Marie Sklodowska Curie research fellow, has been elected to attend the 71st Nobel Laureate Lindau meeting in Chemistry which will be held in Lindau this year. The conference includes Nobel Laureate speakers and attendance is a competitive process. Carla is in the Reisner group where she is developing biohybrid catalysts for sustainable solar fuel production using water and carbon dioxide as feedstock.

“I was thrilled to know that I had been invited to attend the 71st Lindau Nobel Meeting, because it is a very prestigious conference with the participation of Nobel Laureates (about 35) and 600 top early career researchers selected from all over the world over a competitive 2-step selection process. I expect to learn about the experiences of the Nobel Laureates as well as participating in fruitful discussions with them and the other early career researchers. This will allow to establish a network and be part of the Lindau alumni to collaborate or possible work together in the future.”

She adds: "I will start my own research group in October in Spain, as Junior Group Leader “La Caixa” at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) and the University Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Tarragona, thanks to being awarded a prestigious grant from “La Caixa” Foundation that also receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme."

May M.M. Chim

The Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA) was awarded to PhD student May M.M. Chim, part of the Schmidt research group. The award was for her poster titled “Model simulations of the climate impacts of volcanic eruptions in a future warming scenario.” This award was presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2021 under the Atmospheric Science category.

She explains that “My research investigates the climate impacts of volcanic eruptions under global warming by performing future climate simulations using the UK Earth System Model.

“The new methodology in my research is a first attempt to account for the impacts of climate change on volcanic eruptive plumes in an Earth System Model, which allows better evaluation of the climate impacts of volcanoes under global warming.”

Incoming students and fellowships in the Reisner group

Professor Erwin Reisner writes:

  • Dr Tessel Bouwens of the University of Amsterdam received a Dutch Rubicon postdoc fellowship to join us this Autumn. She aims to combine artificial photosynthesis with biocatalysts in bio-hybrid devices that employ solar energy to synthesise important chemicals, such as building blocks for medicines.
  • Dr Shannon A. Bonke chaired at the Gordon Research Seminar for Solar Fuels in Tuscany, including designing the schedule and selecting the speakers. Bonke comments: “The seminar I chaired is the curtain-raiser for the main conference featuring talks from young researchers, PhDs and post-docs, who are the future leaders of the field.”
  • Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowships have been awarded to Dr Bidyut Sarma from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Dr Sayan Kar from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Bidyut is working on in-situ/operando X-Ray absorption spectroscopy and Sayan is investigating waste photoreforming under benign conditions.

To round off the awards, Professor Reisner himself has received the Luigi Galvani Prize from the Bioelectrochemical Society during an annual meeting in Antwerp in April. This prize is awarded to a scientist who has made an important contribution to the field of bioelectrochemistry.