Huaping Xu, and a PhD student Kai Liu, from the Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijiing, visited Bristol from Saturday – Tuesday. After an interesting day of scientific discussions, Huaping gave an excellent talk entitled: “Selenium-containing Polymers: from Molecular Design to Controlled Self-assembly and Disassembly.” We then all rewarded ourselves by going to the Robin Hood on St. Michael’s Hill!
See the link on the University of Bristol’s Weibo pages!
This week I have been in Baltimore, MD (USA) for the 86th Annual Colloids and Surface Science Symposium. The meeting was held at Johns Hopkins University, a beautiful, leafy campus with grand red brick and marble halls.
The conference was organised over 3 days and featured 7 parallel sessions each day in addition to a variety of plenary and award lectures. The science was fascinating, with topics covering the fundamentals of the hydrophobic interaction, micro-scale self-folding origami structures, and biological and environmental applications. I presented my talk, “Oligo(aniline) nanofilms via ionic self-assembly”, on the 2nd day within the Molecular Assembly section, which also featured talks on poly(electrolyte)-surfactant complexation and other surface self-assembly.
The conference banquet was held on the evening of the second day at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Highlights of the food on offer were the local specialties of crab cakes and steamed crab!
Check out the picture gallery for some shots of Johns Hopkins University, me presenting and the conference banquet at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.
Carl and Charl ran the Bristol 10k race on Sunday, the 20th of May. They both finished the race under 1h! Here a photo of the two of them – Charl is looking tired and angry, Carl is looking happy and full of energy!
Charl, with a student from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ascended into the clouds over Shanghai, and enjoyed the city from a slightly different (and rather alarming!) perspective … from 250m up!
Zhixiang and Charl enjoyed a relaxing day on Sunday, walking along the famous West Lake in Hangzhou and enjoyed some local fish for lunch. After lunch and a boat trip across the lake, they headed up to Longjin village, famous for it’s excellent tea! We sampled some of the local produce and Zhixiang bargained with the owner of the tea shop about the price of various teas. Finally, after a deal was struck, the lady took us out into the woods and up the hills to their farm! Fascinating stuff! On Monday both Zhixiang and Charl give a lecture at the Institute of Polymer Science and Engineering, Zhijiang University in Hangzhou (host: Prof Gao Chao) before heading off to Shanghai Jiaotong University.
Charl visited the US last week to briefly meet up with UoB undergraduate students on the year-in-industry degree programme. He used this opportunity to stop in Los Angeles and visit Ric Kaner’s group at UCLA (and gave a talk in Ric’s research group meeting), before moving on to DuPont’s central research site in Wilmington (close to Philadelphia) and Argonne National Laboratory (close to Chicago)! The photo was taken in a small town called Newcastle, close to Wilmington.
Jiangtao and Charl in Chengdu!
Charl also had the pleasure to meet Jiangtao, who spent a year in Bristol, during the CCS meeting. They went for a traditional Sichuan-style hot pot meal – very hot indeed!
Chengdu Hotpot - Sichuan style!
Charl attended the Chinese Chemical Society’s meeting in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China from the 13-16th of April. He had the chance to visit the local panda park close to Chengdu with colleagues. Here he is with Dr. Jose Oliviera, the Editor-in-Chief for the journal “Small”, in front of a very lazy panda!
Jose, lazy panda and Charl
Another week is almost over, however, this has been a special one for our group for many reasons: final year project student presentations, Charl starts a visiting professorship in China and summertime has just started in Bristol. Thus, ISA group had a great celebration of flavours and smells from almost all around the world on Thursday night at town.
As part of the degree programmes offered by the School of Chemistry, undergraduate students have to complete a research project in their final year, which includes writing a thesis and an oral presentation. This year, our young lab mates were involved in subjects such as covalent organic frameworks (COFs) based on tetraniline motifs (with possible applications in gas storage or sensing), functionalization of perylenes with electroactive units to achieve new hierarchical architectures for nanostructured materials and the synthesis of surfactant-like molecules with high osseointegration capabilities for their use in hip implants.
Charl holds a prestigious visiting professorship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hosted by Prof. Zhixiang Wei at the National Centre for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, China. For two months, shifu Faul will be working on the field of organic functional nanomaterials and devices and trying to learn the secrets of ancient Chinese cuisine.
On the subject of food, the group visited a buffet restaurant as part of the celebrations for these special events on Thursday night. From my point of view, this place has an interesting concept, cool to hang out with a group of friends but not amazing food. This buffet market has five kiosks, which offer European, Tex-Mex, Asian and Indian food. There is also a huge variety of salads and desserts.
Unfortunately, my lexicon is not good enough to describe summertime in the City of Bristol, but as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words!
Research group meetings and cakes (especially home-made cakes) go hand-in-hand! Thanks to Simon for today’s English speciality!
Faul Research Group 