Welcome to Beth and Botond on joining the group as PhD students, and welcome back to Dan who has joined us as a postdoc following completion of his PhD in the group earlier this year.

Congratulations to Alex on getting his work on stacking interactions accepted in Angewandte, and thanks to Krzysztof for helping with experiments to address the reviewers' comments! The work was also featured as a hot paper.

Congratulations to Dan on passing his PhD viva! Many thanks to Profs. Simon Webb (University of Manchester) and Dominic Campopiano (internal examiner) for asking Dan lots of probing questions about synthetic pore-forming peptides and nanopore modification chemistry!

Congratulation Scott on being the 2024 recipient of the van der Waals Prize (young scientist). The prize distinguishes scientists of high scientific merit who have contributed in an outstanding way to the development of the field of noncovalent interactions.  

Scott's prize was officially announced at the 3rd International Conference on Non-covalent Interactions in Belgrade, Serbia 17-21 June 2024, where he also delivered a lecture. 

The van der Waals prize was established in 2019 by the Chairs of the International Conference of Non-covalent Interactions (Prof. Armando J. L. Pombeiro and Dr. Kamran T. Mahmudov), and alternates between senior and junior awardees each year.

Further details can be found in the chemistry news article

Congratulations to Dongning on securing one of the Chemical Biology theme poster prizes at the Joseph Black Conference! His work on tyrosine bioconjugation is being written up for publication and will hopefully appear in press in the not-so-far future.