Author: natalie.fey

The symposium is organised by Jon Charmant, Natalie Fey, Claire McMullin, Karen Parrish, Chris Russell and Clare Westlake.

Our final speaker in the symposium will be Prof. Michael Seery, University of Bristol. He will talk about ”Learning in the Chemistry Laboratory”.

Michael is currently Deputy Director and Head of International Foundation Programme in the Centre for Academic Language and Development at University of Bristol. Previously he was Professor of Chemistry Education and Director of Teaching at School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh. He has a long interest in laboratory education including many aspects that resonated with those championed by Chris, especially in relation to teaching practical skills and the unique place of the laboratory in the chemistry curriculum.

Dr Jenny Burnham from the University of Sheffield will be our second speaker in the afternoon session, presenting a talk with the title: “Harnessing students’ potential – Stories of engagement, empowerment, and success”.

Jenny’s career teaching chemistry in higher education has spanned 20 years and she is now PFHEA, University of Sheffield Education Prize award winner and NTF (nominee), chair of RSC-HEG, and an enthusiastic member of the HE Chemistry Education community.  Her expertise encompasses laboratory education, professional skills development, the student experience, and working as a teaching specialist, and she is interested in everything related to student education.  And boron.

Jenny first arrived at the University of Bristol School of Chemistry in 1993 as a wide-eyed UCAS applicant hoping for a place on their BSc Chemistry with Studies in Continental Europe.  Four Bristol undergraduate years was followed by three more for her PhD (at Bristol) with Peter Timms.  There she blew up fewer things than he did, but (as Chris enjoyed reminding her) entered X-ray folklore with one particular boron fluoride (sorry JJ) with her boron fluorides.  It was during her PhD that Jenny crossed paths with Chris Adams.  Bristol inorganic chemists (at that time) loved to chat and a firm community revolved around “our” section of the tea room, with regular social activities and a memorable trip to Alton Towers (Chris was driving when the minibus broke down and we ended up taxiing home).

Jenny started as a teaching assistant at the University of Sheffield in 2005, joining a well-established community of ex-Bristol inorganic chemists and keeping up with developments at Bristol and organising a road-trip for Sheffield’s teaching team to the newly-opened ChemLabS when Tom Podesta was in charge.  Jenny and Chris resumed contact when he returned to a teaching position at Bristol.  From non-academic positions, Chris became a lecturer and Jenny a University Teacher, cheering on each others’ initiatives and achievements and aligning ducks in their quest for teaching domination recognition.  For Chris, this included hosting a slick and well-attended Variety in Chemistry Education-Physics Higher Education Conference in 2019 with unparalleled catering (Chris credits Paul Wyatts skills here), baby-friendly sessions (Lecture Theatre 1’s projection booth), and accommodation that is probably better forgotten (shared bathrooms at CHH…).

Then came the pandemic and everything went online.  This provided new challenges but also familiarity with collaboration software enabling much more regular communication and interaction between people in far-flung parts of the country (like Manchester, Sheffield, and Bristol).  The encouragement of peers (like Chris’s challenging the establishment philosophy) gives Jenny confidence and motivation to move onwards and upwards developing her career as a chemistry education specialist in higher education and this talk will cover some of the fun things she has done with students along the way.

In the afternoon, we will switch our focus to chemical education, reflecting Chris’s more recent interests. The afternoon session will start with a talk from Dr Karen Parrish, University of Bristol, with the title: “Mix, measure, mentor: The story of chemistry lab teaching at the University of Bristol”.

Karen is a Lecturer in the School of Chemistry, with a particular focus on laboratory teaching and project work. Earlier in her career she worked in drug discovery with Evotec, while maintaining an interest in education and acting as a school governor. In 2015 she was happy to be able to combine her interests in practical chemistry and education by joining the University of Bristol. She worked with Chris extensively on laboratory teaching from 2015-2021, and shared an interest in developing students’ key skills.

The final structure of the week talk will be given by Dr Jon (Charlie) Charmant, University of Bristol, titled: “Structure of the (not so) weak: grinding away hydrogen bonds to form transition metal coordination complexes.”

After completing a PhD in Selby Knox’s group here at Bristol on the organometallic chemistry of benzyne in 1994, I spent nearly 2 years at the University of Sheffield as the BP Chemicals research associate working on what is now known as the Cativa process for manufacturing  acetic acid and acetic anhydride.  I was offered a position back here, initially as a Junior Fellow and have been here ever since, initially working on organometallic chemistry with Professor Knox before taking up a position as a Research fellow in X-ray Crystallography where I was fortunate enough to get to know Chris Adams as a colleague and friend.  Since then, I’ve taken on a number of roles with a teaching focus, including Senior Tutor and Admissions Tutor, and I’ve recently taken up a newly created role as Director of Student Experience.

Prof. Stuart James will give a talk on “Pt-acetylides with N-donor ligands, Mechanochemistry and Porous Liquids”.

Stuart James is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Queen’s University Belfast, having previously studied and worked in UK and European Universities including the Universities of Bristol (PhD under Professor Paul Pringle), Cambridge (with Paul Raithby), Imperial College London, Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg) and Utrecht.

At Cambridge in the Raithby group, around 1995, he happily overlapped with Chris Adams for a few months. They shared a tucked-away lab, many stimulating conversations and plenty of laughs. They also came to share a research project on a new class of platinum acetylides. At that time, whereas almost all work to date had been done using phosphines as co-ligands, they explored the potential of co-ligands such as bipyridines. This lead to some lovely chemistry – extending Pt-acetylides from Pt(II) to Pt(IV), and engendering properties such as luminescence and electrochemical behaviour. Several other groups worldwide took up this work thereafter.

In his talk he will recount the work done at Cambridge, and give brief overviews of Mechanochemistry and Porous Liquids – two topics currently pursued in his research group at Queen’s University Belfast. Each of these counter-intuitive research topics presents fascinating scientific challenges and opportunities, each can provide more sustainable processes, and each has resulted in a spin-out company.

Dr Mairi Haddow will be presenting in our second Structure of the Week slot, talking about: “[Y(O-2,6-^tBu₂-4-MeC₆H₂)₃]”.

Mairi Haddow completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh and first encountered Chris when she moved to the University of Bristol to embark on a PhD. Mairi ran the X-ray crystallography service in Bristol for 5 years, frequently collaborating with Chris in projects on structural chemistry. After a career break, Mairi returned to crystallography research at Heriot-Watt University before retaining as a teacher. She returned to the University of Edinburgh to take up a teaching-focussed position in 2022.

Paul Raithby is an Emeritus Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Bath.  He obtained his BSc (1973) and PhD (1976) from Queen Mary College, University of London, where he worked on his PhD in structural inorganic chemistry under the supervision of Professor Mike Hursthouse.  He held a professorship at the University of Bath (2000-2021), prior to which he was a faculty member of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge for 25 years. In Cambridge, he worked with Professor the Lord Lewis and Professor Brian Johnson FRS on the chemistry of transition metal cluster compounds and on the organometallic chemistry of platinum acetylide complexes.  This is where he supervised Chris Adams for his Ph.D. Degree between 1995 and 1998.

Paul Raithby’s research interests span aspects of chemical crystallography, including time-resolved crystallography, structural coordination chemistry, and luminescent molecular and polymeric materials.  Chris Adams was one of his first Ph D students to work on luminescent molecular materials.

His talk title is: “From Platinum(II) Complexes to Luminescent Devices: Chris Adams’ Legacy”

Our second speaker on 27th June will be Dr Claire McMullin, giving a short overview of the Structure of the Week talk format, “The History of SotW (Structure of the Week)”

Claire completed her Ph.D. at the University of Bristol (UK) in July 2011 with Prof. Guy Orpen and Dr Natalie Fey, in the Structural Chemistry group that included Dr Chris Adams. Her research included computational modelling and developing novel chiral measures to quantify chirality in organometallic asymmetric catalysis (in collaboration with the CCDC), as well as solving a variety of crystal structures from research groups at the University of Bristol.

After her time in Bristol, Claire spent a year in America as a Post-Doc at the University of North Texas working with Prof. Tom Cundari on late transition metal catalysis. Followed by a 3-year Post-Doc with Prof. Stuart A. Macgregor at Heriot-Watt University working on the mechanism for C-H activation and functionalisation of neutral substrates with Rh(III) and Ru(II) catalysts.

In 2015, Claire joined the University of Bath as a Computational Chemistry Teaching Fellow. In 2022, Claire translated to a Lecturer (Teaching and Research) contract in Inorganic Computational Chemistry, and in 2024 was promoted to Senior Lecturer.