After a great Christmas, we are off to a good start for 2017. The famous “Rough Guides” have very recently voted Bristol as one of the top 10 cities in the world to visit (No. 4!).
This just confirms what we know already – Bristol is a great place to live and work in! In addition, a number of local restaurants have appeared in The Guardian’s “The 50 best breakfast places in the UK“.
Carl had passed his viva today, and we can now finally call him Dr Hu! Well done Carl! His external examiner was Prof. Bo Laursen, from the University of Copenhagen, and internal was Dr George Whittell.
Celebrations already started, and will continue later in the day! Congratulations!
Time flies, and we had our annual Christmas lunch at Charl & Jacqueline’s home! Great food, great company, fantastic “Secret Santa” presents, and some great games!
We also had a Christmas Quiz – with two tasty prizes! What a way to prepare for Christmas!
Carl’s paper in Advanced Optical Materials was published online today!
As the paper was published as an open access paper (like many other papers from the FRG), feel free to click on the link and download the paper free of charge! Great collaborative effort from all those involved – well done!
Charl had the pleasure of visiting Malaysia for some recruitment activities (in and around Kuala Lumpur) recently.
It was a busy time, with visits to the Ministry of Education, a local matriculation college (just outside KL), as well as a British Council Recruitment fair. More photos from the school visit to appear shortly!
In order to welcome all new group members, and just to get to know each other a bit better, we went to one of our favourite restaurants again … Cosmo!
As usual, the quality (and quantity!) of food was excellent! Unfortunately not everyone could join in, but this means that we will just have to go soon again!
The University of Bristol has just finalised a new agreement with the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for 20 PhD students per year for the next 5 years. This is great news, and Bristol will benefit greatly from this new initiative!
Charl is currently in Beijing talking to prospective CSC PhD candidates at the International Graduate Scholarship Fair of the CSC.
Charl had his birthday recently, and we celebrated with friends, former group members and colleagues, and consumed lots of cake!
Here Charl and the group with some evidence of cake still left!
Charl also visited Prof Bo Song at the University of Soochow, Suzhou, China. Bo, a former PhD student of close collaborator prof Xi Zhang at Tsinghua University, was the perfect host, and made sure that the stay was perfect!
Charl gave two lectures – one covering research aspects from the Faul Research Group, and one where he shared some experiences about laboratory safety from the School of Chemistry here in Bristol!
Yaozu put together a one-day symposium on advanced functional materials and supramolecular chemistry at Donghua University, Shanghai, where he now holds a professorship.
He invited a number of speakers (including Arne Thomas from Berlin, and Charl!), as well as a number of local colleagues who also spent time in Bristol as post docs.
It was a great day of exciting science, spanning fundamental science all the way through to real-word applications. Well done Yaozu!
