Congratulations to Ram, who submitted his PhD Thesis for examination earlier today. Ram conducted structural and biochemical studies of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isocitrate lyase during his PhD. Ram was very keen to learn new skills and techniques during his PhD. He was very productive and his PhD work has already led to three publications, and (hopefully) a couple more to come. After his PhD, Ram will move to Australia to continue to pursue his scientific career as a postdoctoral fellow. Well done and congratulations!
José joined us in November as a University of Auckland Summer Research Scholar. He worked with Danilo to produce ribosomal proteins. José is a very bright student. During his time in the lab, he was very keen to learn new skills and didn’t mind spending weekends doing experiments in the laboratory. We hope you enjoyed working in Auckland and had time to explore New Zealand. We would also like to wish you all the best for your future studies. You are welcome to come back any time in the future!
Oi Wei will also leave us next week (temporarily) to conduct some cell-based experiments in Dr Alexander Wolf’s lab in Germany. Safe travel and good luck with the experiments!
Congratulations to Dr Yu Li to have her PhD degree formally approved and awarded by the Senate of the University of Auckland. Well done and well deserved!
The Group went to Long Bay for a barbecue to celebrate the end of the year. 2017 has been a successful year for the group. Congratulations to Mike, Nasri, Danilo, Yu, Ram, Brooke, Naasson and Praveen for their authorship and co-authorship in the Group’s publications in 2017.
We also take this opportunity to wish happy birthday to Brooke and Jinal, and to congratulate Yu Li for successfully defending her PhD thesis.
Green Chemistry New Zealand 2017 (GCNZ17), New Zealand’s first Green Chemistry conference, was successfully held at the Science Centre, The University of Auckland on the 8th and 9th of December. GCNZ17 was organised by the Centre for Green Chemical Science with the support from the Vice Chancellor’s Strategic Development Fund. The conference organising committee was co-chaired by Associate Professor Jonathan Sperry and Ivan.
The conference was attended by over 130 delegates from 13 different countries. We had 26 talks and 4 keynote lectures covering all aspects of Green Chemistry, ranging from clean chemical synthesis and pollution prevention to next generation batteries and new biorefinery concepts. In addition to the lectures, we also had 35 poster presentations.
The poster prizes are sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry journals ‘Sustainable Energy & Fuels’ and ‘Green Chemistry’. They were judged by Professor Amy Prieto (Colorado State University), who is a member of the advisory board of Sustainable Energy & Fuels, and Professor Philip Jessop (Queen’s University, Canada), who is the chair of the editorial board of Green Chemistry.
Congratulations to the winners of the poster prizes:
RSC Sustainable Energy & Fuels Poster Prize
Stephen Lo (The University of Auckland) – with A/Prof. David Barker and Dr Bruno Fedrizzi
Poster #22 – Derivatisation of Flavonoids Extracted from Food Waste
RSC Green Chemistry Poster Prize
Ram P. Bhusal (The University of Auckland) – with A/Prof. Jonathan Sperry
Poster #4 – A Sustainable Approach for the Synthesis of Valued Added Nitrogen-Heterocycles
Registration deskPoster SessionPoster SessionPoster SessionLunch sessionDuring the conferenceDuring the conferenceRSC Sustainable Energy & Fuels Poster Prize – Stephen LoRSC Green Chemistry Poster Prize – Ram P. Bhusal
Ivan attended the Australian and New Zealand Society for Magnetic Resonance (ANZMAG) 2017 Conference, which was held in Kingscliff, Australia between the 2nd and 6th of December. He gave a talk on the use of the waterLOGSY technique to determine protein-ligand binding constant, a work that was conducted by Mike and collaborators in the UK. You can read more about the Talk and the conference via the link here.
Conference OpeningConference DinnerKingscliff, NSW, AustraliaMantra on Salt Beach
Congratulations Yu Li for successfully passing her PhD oral examination – Yu is the first PhD graduate from the group!
Yu’s PhD was focussed on the studies of grape polyphenol oxidase, in which she completed a diverse set of projects from extracting the enzyme from grape juice to elucidating the substrate selectivity of the enzyme through mutagenesis. To date, Yu published three papers (including one first author paper) through the work that she did during her PhD. One more manuscript is currently under review.
Thank you very much Yu for your hard work on your project and for teaching other students in the lab. I would also like to thank you for your effort in helping with setting up and looking after the lab (especially when the group was in its infancy a couple of years ago in Grafton).
Congratulations and very best of luck for your future!
I would also like to thank Yu’s co-supervisor Professor Paul Kilmartin, as well as the examiners Drs Elena Harjes (Massey University) and Nevena Petkova (Sofia University), and Dr Viji Sarojini as the HoD nominee.
Following the Annual General Meeting today, Ivan is delighted to be able to continue to serve as Treasurer of the NZIC Auckland branch for another year.
Congratulations to Yu Li, who is co-supervised by Professor Paul Kilmartin and Ivan, for her first-author paper in ChemistrySelect, which was published today. The paper described her work in the development of a NMR-based kinetic and inhibition assay to study polyphenol oxidases. Together with Ayesha Zafar from the group of Dr Jóhannes Reynisson, Yu applied the assay to screen and characterise novel inhibitors for polyphenol oxidases. Well done Yu and hopefully a few more papers to come soon.
You can read the paper by following the link below:
Oi Wei and Ivan attended a one day meeting on Batten Disease today at Lincoln University, Christchurch. The meeting was attended by researchers in New Zealand who work on Batten Disease, family members as well as funders. It was a very useful meeting (on many levels) and we thank Professor David Palmer of Lincoln University for organising and for inviting us to join the community. We hope to be able to provide an update on the progress of our work in the next meeting, and we hope our work will one day help contribute to finding a cure for the disease (though it will be a long way to go).
