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December 2014

Collaborator Richard Walton visited St Andrews this month, to talk with Sharon, Daniel and Andrew about a range of projects, including work on phosphate-based frameworks and perovskites.

The group Christmas dinner took place early this month in Forgans restaurant in St Andrews.

The group welcomed new postdoctoral researcher Nasima Kanwal this month. Nasima will be coordinating the experimental section of Sharon’s ERC grant. See the group members page for more details.

Daniel and Giulia both spent time at the UK 850 MHz Solid-State NMR Facility this month. Daniel was performing 71Ga experiments on gallophosphate materials, while Giulia was studying a doubly isotopically-labelled zeolite sample.

October 2014

The group welcomed two new PhD students this month - Rob (returning after his undergraduate project) and Arantxa. See the group members page for more details.

A number papers were published this month, including an invited perspectives article by Sharon and Scott on NMR of quadrupolar nuclei (J. Am. Chem. Soc.), Valerie and Sharon’s work with collaborator Paul Wright (Chem. Eur. J.), a paper with collaborator Russell Morris (Hot article in Angew. Chemie), and a paper with former group member Diego and Geoffrey Bodenhausen (RSC Advances). Also accepted this month is Valerie’s paper (with Paul Wright) in a special edition of Solid State NMR on NMR Crystallography. See the Publications page for more details.

Paula, Henri and Andrew all spent time at the UK 850 MHz Solid-State NMR Facility this month, carrying out experiments on 77Se, 25Mg and 39K NMR. The group was visited by Nicole Faure (University of Glasgow) who carried out some 19F NMR experiments at the facility.

September 2014

Sharon spent three days at the Italian GIDRM NMR Meeting in Bari this month, where she was a plenary speaker. She gave a talk entitled “Probing Disorder in the Solid State using NMR and First-Principles Calculations”.

Daniel and Sharon’s paper “Investigating Relationships between the Crystal Structure and 31P Isotropic Chemical Shifts in Calcined Aluminophosphates” was accepted for publication in J. Phys. Chem C this month. This describes some of the work Daniel carried out in his thesis to investigate whether it is possible to predict NMR parameters directly from local structure, without the need for costly DFT calculations.

Henri spent 6 days at the UK 850 MHz Solid-State NMR Facility this month, applying his new FAM-N pulses to 25Mg NMR.

The group welcomed Dr Laurent Le Polles who visited St Andrews for a few days this month, with a view to a longer visit in 2015.

Welcome to new undergraduate research students - Richard Parke, who is working jointly for Daniel and Sharon (and helped by Giulia), and Martin Stanford, working with Derek Woollins and Sharon (and helped by Paula). See the group members page for more details.

Sharon spent some time in Hong Kong this month for the last part of her work on the 2014 RAE panel. Although mostly work she did get a chance to see some of the sights.

This month the group said good bye to Valerie, who has finished her PDRA position. Valerie also completed her PhD within the group, graduating in 2012. Valerie spent a number of years in St Andrews, and had made a significant contribution to much of the research we have carried out in the last few years. We wish her well with her new position in Canada.

This month also saw the end of the summer projects, with Adam and Jack headed back to their studies. Jack presented his work as a poster at a reception in Edinburgh, which was attended by Sharon and Daniel.

A paper with collaborator Dr Bela Bode was published this month in J. Org. Chem. See the Publications page for details of all publications this year.

Scott spent some time at the UK 850 facility this month, working with collaborator Professor Paul Wright on 67Zn NMR.

July 2014

All of the Ashbrook group and facility manager Daniel headed off to the Rocky Mountains Conference on Magnetic Resonance in Colorado. Valerie, Scott, Daniel, Henri, Paula, Giulia and Andrew presented posters, while Sharon chaired a session as part of her work on the organising committee. Congratulations to Paula who won a poster prize for her poster “Using 77Se and 125Te Solid-State NMR to Study Chalcogen-Containing Materials”. After the conference a number of members of the group headed off to travel to various parts of the US.

Sharon, Valerie and Scott travelled to the ICAMM 2014 Meeting in Nantes, for a conference based around advanced materials modelling. Sharon gave a plenary talk entitled “Probing Disorder in Solids”, and Scott gave a contributed oral presentation “Exploiting the 31P Chemical Shift Anisotropy of Aluminophosphates”. Valerie presented her work as a poster. While in Nantes, the group met up with former group member Dr Karen Johnston, who is now working in the city.

Henri’s paper, “Efficient Amplitude-Modulated Pulses for Triple- to Single-Quantum Coherence Conversion in MQMAS NMR” was accepted for publication in J. Phys. Chem A this month. Congratulations!

The group was joined this month by Madras student Jack McLean, who won a Nuffield placement. Jack will be working alongside summer student Adam investigating the loading of small molecules into Cu-based MOFs.

June 2014

June has been a busy month for the group!

Also this month, Valerie presented a poster at the annual ScotCHEM Computational Chemistry Meeting in Edinburgh. Scott, Valerie and Giulia attended the RSC Younger Members Symposium in Birmingham, where Giulia was awarded a prize for her poster “Solid-State NMR Characterisation of 17O-Enriched UTL-Derived Zeolites”.

Valerie, Scott, Paula, Giulia and Andrew also attended the NMRDG Postgraduate Meeting in Nottingham. In both Birmingham and Nottingham Valerie gave a talk entitled “Application of NMR Crystallography to the Investigation of Charge-Balancing Mechanisms in the Aluminophosphate STA-2”. See here for some pictures.

Congratulations to Daniel Dawson who graduated with his PhD this month! Also graduating were project students Rob Moran (MChem Chemistry), James Thomas and Martin Micklethwaite (BSc Chemistry) and former project student Emily Pearson (MChem Chemistry with Maths). All four were awarded first class degrees. Particular congratulations to Rob and Martin who were awarded the prize for the best graduating MChem and BSc students.

Scott spent a week in Liverpool this month in the group of Dr Fred Blanc, carrying out some 17O enrichment experiments. While he was there he also gave a talk on his work on pyrochlores. Thanks to the group in Liverpool for all their help.

The group was visited by collaborator Professor Richard Walton from Warwick this month. Richard met with Sharon, Valerie and Daniel to review some ongoing work on aluminophosphates.

Scott and Daniel visited the 850 MHz solid-state NMR facility this month to carry out some 67Zn NMR of MOFs. Daniel also spent some time with collaborator John Hanna in Warwick using the low field NMR facilities there to study some paramagnetic MOFs.

Daniel’s paper, “Characterisation of Structural Disorder in γ-Ga2O3”, with collaborator Richard Walton, has been accepted for publication in J. Phys. Chem C.

May 2014

Paula’s paper (in collaboration with the Woollins group) was accepted for publication in Organometallics this month. Her work in Dalton Transactions was also published this month. See the publications page for more information.

Sharon has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant which started this month.  She was awarded £1.6 M for her project “Exploiting 17O NMR Spectroscopy: Atomic-Scale Structure, Disorder and Dynamics in Solids”

The group attended the UK 850 MHz solid-state NMR facility annual symposium at the University of Warwick. Scott gave a talk entitled “Exploiting the 31P Chemical Shift Anisotropy of Aluminophosphates”.

Congratulations to the four undergraduate students Hanna, Rob, James and Martin who finished their projects in the group this month. Rob, James and Martin will graduate in June, while Hanna has one more year remaining on her MChem Chemistry course. James and Martin’s projects were jointly supervised by Dr Iain Smellie.

Sharon and Daniel attended the annual meeting of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Integrated Magnetic Resonance (iMR), held in Dundee. Daniel gave a workshop for the students on solid-state NMR, while Sharon gave a research presentation about recent work combining calculations and experiments to study disorder in inorganic solids.

March 2014

An invited perspectives article, entitled “Recent Developments in Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy of Microporous Materials” by Sharon, Daniel and Valerie has been accepted in the RSC journal Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. this month. See the publications page for more information.

Paula’s paper (in collaboration with the Woollins group) was accepted in Dalton Transactions this month. See the publications page for more information.

Rob, Hanna, James and Martin gave their oral presentations on their honours projects this month. All gave an excellent presentation and they are now finishing their final reports.

February 2014

Scott gave a talk at the St Andrews computational seminar this month, on his recent work investigating the use of dispersion corrections when performing DFT calculations on aluminophosphate frameworks.

Scott’s paper, entitled “Calculating NMR Parameters in Aluminophosphates: Evaluation of Dispersion Correction Schemes” was published in PCCP this month. The paper describes his recent work to investigate the accuracy with which NMR parameters can be calculated for microporous framework materials. See the publications page for more information.

New PhD student Giulia Bignami has joined the group this month. Giulia is from Italy and will be jointly supervised by Sharon and Professor Russell Morris.

Valerie, Scott, Andrew, Paula and Henri attended a NSCCS training workshop in St Andrews this month, where they were able to get hand on experience of carrying out different types of calculations using computer different codes, including CASTEP and ADF.

Former PhD student Diego Carnevale visited the group this month to carry out some experiments. Diego is is now working with Professor Geoffrey Bodenhausen in Lausanne.