There might be many more reasons to be cheerful, but we would like to mention at least two here! Charl has recently taken on more responsibility (in addition to his research activities) within the School of Chemistry. He is now “Director of Graduate Recruitment”, and in charge of all graduate recruitment (home, EU and international, both MRes and PhD) for the School of Chemistry …

On the research front, we heard yesterday that Tom’s recently published paper has now been selected by Soft Matter as one of their “Hot Papers” for August. The paper is featured on the Soft Matter blog, and is available for free download!

Charl spent the morning at St Katherine’s, a local school close to Bristol, talking about chemistry, science and careers in science. It was a great opportunity to interact with and talk to a range of students (from Year 8 through to Year 12)!

As we are approaching the grant writing season, I thought it good to highlight upcoming opportunities to join the FRG.  These might not be suitable for all candidates, so please read carefully:

If you have >10 publications and patents, and are not based in the UK, it might be possible to apply for a prestigious EU Marie Curie Fellowship. There are a number of schemes, including International Incoming Fellowships (for researchers based outside the EU) and Intra-European Fellowships (if you have spent at least the last 18 months within the EU, irrespective of your nationality).  Please only contact me if are over the threshold of 10 publications. Internal deadline for submissions of applications is mid August, so please contact me if you think you are eligible.

Charl is spending his last few days in China networking and meeting colleagues from all over the world (but mostly from Europe!):  at the end of last week he joined the Euraxess Share Event (at the impressive French Embassy in down-town Beijing), and will join the Sino-German symposium (“Frontiers of Functional Supramolecular Systems”) at Tsinghua (Monday and Tuesday this week).

He also attended the UoB’s graduation ceremony on Saturday, the 20^th of April, but more on that in a separate post!

We arrived at NIMS in Tsukuba today, after taking the famous Shinkansen from Kyoto.  The Executive Vice-President of NIMS, Dr. Sone, and Prof Aono, Director General of the International Centre for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, MANA, at NIMS, Tsukuba, Japan, were our hosts today.  Prof Aono has also organised a joint NSQI-MANA Symposium for Wednesday, 7th of November.

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