Charl had the pleasure to visit Xiaoyu, collaborator and co-author on our Nature Communications paper last year, at the Beijing Institute of Technology.
It was a great opportunity to catch up with Xiaoyu, listen to some talks from his students, and finally for Charl to give a research seminar as well. Hopefully there will be many such future interactions, and continued collaboration!
Charl was invited and visited Wei and Jiangtao, to former FRG group members, in Xi’an. A minisymposium was organised, with both of them, and a colleague, speaking as well! It was a great morning of exciting science!
Charl visited the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at Peking University in Beijing today. He visited old friends Prof Qi Limin, who also spent time at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Golm, and Prof Yun Yan, who was part of the same ESF scientific network.
After Charl’s talk there were some very interesting discussion with prof Huang Jianbin concerning the FRG’s recent paper in Chemical Science!
We had the pleasure of hosting our annual Timms Symposium, with a line-up of outstanding speakers! Prof Takuzo Aida spent some time with the Faul Research Group on Tuesday, before giving an outstanding lecture as the named Timms Lecturer on Wednesday afternoon!
What a pleasure and a privilege to have Professors Aida, Rachel O’Reilly (Birmingham) and Nicolas Giuseppone (Strasbourg) giving talks!
In addition, Maha from the FRG joined the line-up of speakers and gave a great talk! Well done Maha!
Liam had his viva yesterday – and passed with flying colours! 
His external, Dr Hugo Bronstein from Cambridge, also gave an excellent talk in the afternoon!
Well done to Dr Liam, and thank you to Hugo!
As the academic year rushes along, it was that time of the year again – the final year undergraduate research project students gave their presentations recently (after some delays due to the bad weather).
As is the tradition, we said “well done” and “goodbye” by going to Cosmo for a great all-you-can-eat lunch!
Charlie (jointly supervised by close collaborator Ian Manners and Charl) defended his thesis earlier this week, with Prof Gustavo Fernandez from Muenster acting as external examiner. Charlie did a superb job, and will be wrapping up his minor corrections soon!
In addition to the viva, we also enjoyed an afternoon of student talks (with Maha from the FRG giving a great talk!), with Gustavo ending off the afternoon of exciting science with some of the detailed mechanistic work on supramolecular self-assembly from his laboratories.
