News

The work of UBC Chemistry Professor David M. Perrin and his research group has made the cover of this month’s Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. Curtis H. Lam, Christopher J. Hipolito, Marcel Hollenstein and David M. Perrin authored “A divalent metal-dependent self-cleaving DNAzyme with a tyrosine side chain.”

Dr. Laurel Schafer was awarded UBC's Sustainability Research Fellowship in recognition of catalyst development which focuses on atom-economic transformations that avoid the formation of wasteful byproducts 

Bob McDonald, award-winning and beloved Canadian science personality, gave a fantastic lecture yesterday, “Science as I’ve Seen It” to kick off the 2011/2012 Lectures in Modern Chemistry series. Bob kept the 300+ audience entertained as he recounted experiences spanning his 35-year career as a science journalist; transporting the audience all the way from Mars – millions of kilometers away – to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory 6,800 feet below the Earth’s surface.

DEADLINES are looming! The UBC Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowships and Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships are excellent opportunities for qualified individuals to advance their careers at UBC Chemistry.

To address several issues relating to the analysis of near-edge XAS data, Mario Delgado spearheaded an intense effort over the last three years to develop an approach to data analysis that would remove user bias in the fitting of near-edge and background features. The Monte Carlo-based approach minimizes user bias and provides a statistical analysis of obtained fit parameters. With the help of Craig Mewis, he has implemented this approach in a Matlab program entitled BlueprintXAS,...

Prof Derek Gates and his student Josh Bates, in collaboration with Prof Pierre Kennepohl, have investigated the electronic structure of an abnormal carbene generated from the reaction of NHCs with phosphaalkenes to form 4-phosphino-2-carbenes. Josh discovered this surprising reactivity and probed possible reaction pathways using computational methods; the details of this study were published as a communication in Angew. Chem. and was subsequently highlighted by Chemical &...

August 17, 2011

The Department of Chemistry unveiled a ground-breaking new learning space this week, the Shared Instrument Facility (SIF). This innovative space combines a laboratory and student resource centre, and will transform the learning environment for students at UBC.  Undergraduates now have unprecedented access to highly specialized equipment that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Danielle Covelli was awarded an honourable mention and a $250 prize from Helvetica Chimica Acta, for her poster presented during the 15th International Conference on Bioinorganic Chemistry (ICBIC15), held on campus at UBC in early August. Over 200 students were eligible for twelve poster prizes at the conference, with representation from across the world.

Polly Yu and Alex Radke recently participated in the 2011 RISE Canada Conference, held on August 26th on the campus of the University of Regina. The conference was the culmination of a summer-long research experience as part of the "Reactive Intermediates Student Exchange" that sent both students across the country.