December 2006

During December, Sharon and Karen visited the Wimperis Group in Glasgow to do some 11B and 45Sc NMR experiments. Sharon and Diego also spent a week in the Duer Group in Cambridge performing 13C and 11B experiments. During this week both the Ashbrook and Duer groups attended the Christmas meeting of the British Radiofrequency Spectroscopy Group in London. At this meeting, Sharon gave an invited talk entitled “Probing Structure and Dynamics in High-Pressure Silicates”.

On the 11th December the Wimperis and Ashbrook groups enjoyed a joint Christmas dinner in Glasgow. A day later, a second group dinner (jointly with the Morris Group in St Andrews) was held.

November 2006

During the first week of November Sharon was involved with the University of St Andrews “Chembus”, demonstrating a series of chemical experiments to S1 and S2 pupils in local secondary schools.

Sharon recently gave a department seminar during a visit to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen entitled “Multinuclear Solid-State NMR: Methods and Applications”.

See the Publications page for news of our latest paper “Si Vacancies in the 10 Å phase”, a collaboration with Dr Mark Welch at the Natural History Museum, published in American Mineralogist.

Sharon and Diego both spent time at the University of Glasgow this month, using the NMR spectrometers in the Wimperis Group. Sharon also spent a few days at the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick with collaborator Dr Steven Brown and their PhD student Nathan Barrow.

October 2006

Malcom Roxburgh, a BSc Chemistry/Mathematics student, has joined the group for his final year project.

September 2006

A new PhD student, Diego Carnevale, has joined the group. Diego graduated in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from La Sapienza, Rome in Italy and has spent time working in industry on solution-state NMR. Also joining the group is Karen Johnston, a PhD student working on a project supervised by Dr Phil Lightfoot and Dr Sharon Ashbrook.

Sharon’s latest paper, a collaboration with the Wimperis Group in Glasgow, entitled “STARTMAS: a MAS-Based Methods for Acquiring Isotropic NMR Spectra of Spin I = 3/2 Nuclei in Real Time” has been accepted for publication in Chem. Phys. Lett. Also this week, a paper in collaboration with the group of Professor Simon Redfern in Cambridge “Characterisation of the (Y1–xLax)2Ti2O7 Systems by Powder Diffraction and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy”  has been accepted in J. Mater. Chem.

Sharon spent the first two weeks of September in Nottingham attending two conferences. The first was the 50th Jubilee Meeting of the British Radiofrequency Spectroscopy Group (BRSG)where she presented a poster on some recent 89Y NMR work. The second conference was a meeting for recently appointed academics in Physical Chemistry, organised by the RSC Faraday Division, where she gave an invited talk describing her work on solid-state NMR of quadrupolar nuclei.

July 2006

Sharon has just returned from the 2006 Euromar conference held in York where she gave a talk entitled “Study of High-Pressure Silicates using High-Resolution NMR and First-Principles Calculations”. In the same session there were also talks from collaborators Dr Steve Wimperis (Glasgow) and Dr Steven Brown (Warwick).

June 2006

Sharon spent the last week of June in Glasgow with the recently relocated  Wimperis Group, working on 17O NMR of high-pressure minerals and meeting Dr Alan Gregorovic, newly appointed as a Leverhulme Trust funded postdoctoral research fellow.

Sharon gave a departmental seminar at the Department of Chemistry at the Open University in Milton Keynes entitled “High-Resolution Solid-State NMR: Methods and Applications” on June 14th. She also met with collaborator Dr Richard Walton and visited collaborators in Cambridge on the same trip.

See the Publications page for news of three papers which have just been published in Chemical Physics Letters, Journal of the American Chemical Society and Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

May 2006

A review entitled “Structural Information from Quadrupolar Nuclei in Solids” by Sharon E. Ashbrook and Melinda Duer (Cambridge) has just been published in Concepts in Magnetic Resonance.

A paper in collaboration with Steve Wimperis (Glasgow) “Nuclear Overhauser Effect (NOE) Enhancement of 11B NMR Spectra of Borane Adducts in the Solid State” has also just appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

April 2006

Sharon has just returned from the 2006 ENC in Asilomar, California where she gave a talk entitled “Exploiting First-Principles Calculations and High-Resolution NMR for the Study of High-Pressure Silicates, Sharon E. Ashbrook, Andrew J. Berry, Chris J. Pickard and Stephen Wimperis”. She travelled to California with collaborators Dr Stephen Wimperis and Marica Cutajar (Glasgow)