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.

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 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.

Congratulations to Ivan on passing his PhD viva. Many thanks to Jonathan Clayden (University of Bristol) and Ephrath Moroshko for grilling Ivan on Intramolecular Hydrogen Bonds!

Congratulations on getting his article entitled 'Context-dependent significance of London dispersion' published in Accounts of Chemical Research. Louis' article contrasts our own experimental findings with those from other research groups to reveal the striking context-dependent nature of the energetic significance of London dispersion. The work addresses the pressing issue of why the influences of dispersion forces manifest in some systems while in others they are cancelled out or dominated by other contributions, and particularly solvent effects.

Congratulations to Tim on winning the runner-up prize on his presentation on the molecular simulation of molecular machines at the Organic Section Firbush postgraduate conference, 30 Aug to 1 Sept 2023 on the banks of Loch Tay.

Congratulations to Andrew West, Nick Dominelli-Whiteley and Ivan Smoliar on getting their work on measuring the energetics of halogen-arene van der Waals contacts in solution published in Angewandte Chemie. Spoiler alert: they aren't worth very much! The finding is remarkable as it might be anticipated from x-ray structures, gas-phase calculations and chemical intuition that bringing a polarisable halogen (especially iodine) into contact with a polarisable aromatic ring might result in substantial favourable London dispersion interactions, but this seems not to be the case; at least not in the Wilcox molecular balance that we employed for the study. All the halogen-arene interactions were disfavoured, with iodine being the most disfavoured. In stark contrast, the methyl-arene interaction was weakly favourable. The work was also highlighted in Chemistry Views:

Thank you to all members of the Cockroft group and Oren Scherman for helping in the organisation, and hosting of the 5th ERC Grantees' conference held here in (not-so-sunny) Edinburgh 11-13 July. The conference was a huge success and greatly enjoyed, so much so that we now have volunteers to host future events well into the 2030s! Arri Priimägi and Olli Ikkala will host the 6th Edition in Finland, summer 2025, with a prospective theme of "From Responsive Molecules to Interactive Materials". Francesco Ricci and Alberto Credi, are proposed to host the 7th Edition in Italy, 2027 (and as a reserve location for 2025).