New Friends and Teamwork
01 July 2008
This is my first newsletter as President of the Organic Division and I'd like to take this opportunity to update you on some of the activities supported by the Organic Division Executive in the last year, and also to invite you to engage in our planning for future activities.
As you are probably aware, the Division stimulates and supports a wide range of meetings, from one-day regional meetings and awards symposia to major international conferences (see box below). We are, however, always looking for new ideas. If you'd like to organise a meeting, particularly in a breaking area of organic chemistry, please send your ideas to me (details at bottom of page) so that we can explore ways in which the Division might help.
Over the last eighteen months or so, Ray Jones, the immediate past-President of the Division has led a very successful campaign to stimulate interactions between UK and Indian organic chemists (see box below). Building on the success of this venture, we are starting to consider initiatives in China and Africa. If you would like to get involved in any of these three initiatives, please let me know how you think you could contribute.
Revamped Awards
Closer to home, this year has seen a major review of the RSC awards procedures and portfolio. Along with all other groups, the Organic Division was asked to review its awards. The Organic Division Executive consulted widely and the new set of awards will be announced very soon.
Please make a note to look out for the announcement of the new awards in October's RSC News, and subsequently to nominate candidates for the awards. The new nomination procedure will be much more straightforward.
Teamwork
July brings the end of the RSC year, and with it a change of membership of the Organic Division Executive. I would like to thank retiring members, Keith Jones, Phil Jones, Helen Osborn, and Nick Williams for their commitment and to welcome Rebecca Goss, Martin Swarbrick, James Bruce, and Nabil Asaad.
I am delighted to say that David Rees has agreed to be a Vice-President of the Division, and he joins current Vice-Presidents Tim Donohoe and David O'Hagan for the year ahead.
If you are interested in joining the Organic Division Executive in 2009, a call for nominations will be issued in the December issue of RSC News. For more information about what the role entails, please don't hesitate to contact me or any other member of the Executive.
Sue Gibson
Indian interactions spark new work
The RSC is committed to strengthening its international profile, and developing productive relationships with chemistry communities around the world.
In view of the rapid growth in the organic chemical sector in India, the Organic Division launched an initiative last year to foster interactions between organic chemists from the UK and India.
This time last year, a group of eleven organic chemists representing UK academia and industry were preparing to travel to the NOST-12 (National Organic Synthesis Trust) Symposium in Goa.
UK post-graduates at J-NOST-3 |
The meeting proved to be a great success, not only in terms of the wide and varied interactions that took place at the meeting, but also in terms of stimulating further activities.
On our return from Goa, Vinod Singh, the Chair of NOST-12, issued an invitation to seven UK post-graduates to participate at J-NOST-3, the 'junior' version of NOST. As a result, in November last year, Julien Brioche (Sheffield), Stephanie Irvine (Strathclyde), Jacob Rendell (Imperial), Vincent Brunet (St Andrews), Laura Seager (Loughborough), Fanny Tran (Reading), and Ketan Ruparelia (de Montfort) travelled to the University of Amristar in Panjab.
All our delegates gave a talk on their PhD research, and all participated fully in the busy scientific and sight-seeing programme organised by their Indian hosts. For me, the students' experience is best summarised by the following quote: "The scientific and human interaction with the other students has been really good as we don't really know their cultures, and they don't really know ours."
I am delighted to say that the invitations to J-NOST and NOST have been reissued. As I write, the selection process for J-NOST-4 to be held at Madurai Kamaraj University in November this year is underway, and we are planning to organise a delegation to attend NOST XIII in 2009.
Other plans for the future include the establishment of a series of lecture tours by UK chemists, which will be designed to stimulate scientific interactions and discussion of wider issue
Young scientists shine at meetings
Meetings and conferences lie at the heart of scientific progress, and their success or otherwise is a good indicator of the health of a discipline. The Division stimulates and supports many meetings each year. Highlighted here are our regional meetings and symposia on topics that reach out to other scientific areas.
Our annual series of regional meetings took place this year in Glasgow (Scottish), Oxford (South and West), Sheffield (Midlands), and Newcastle (North East). All these meetings placed young academics, post-docs, and postgraduates centre stage. This strategy was rewarded with significant industrial sponsorship for each meeting, and excellent attendance at all four meetings (150-200 delegates each).
I am delighted to announce that a new regional meeting will be launched later this year. Alethea Tabor and Jon Wilden at University College London are organising a meeting that will take place at UCL in September, allowing chemists in South East England to present their work and to foster new links with local industry.
'Drugs from Natural Products IV' was held in Cambridge over two days in early April. The meeting, co-sponsored by Organic Division, and the Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector of the Industry and Technology Forum, brought together world-class speakers from industry and academia and provided an excellent opportunity to reaffirm the important role that natural products play in the search for new medicines.
Future Plans
Looking to the future, the IUPAC Congress to be held in Glasgow in July 2009, will host a range of symposia of interest to organic chemists working at various interfaces.
In 2010 the Organic and Dalton Divisions will co-host a Discussion meeting on 'Metal catalysed functionalisation of CH and C-X bonds'. The chair of the scientific committee is Todd Marder (Durham). The meeting will bring together the organic, organometallic and inorganic communities to discuss the current state of the art, and the development and future of late metal-catalysed cross-coupling strategies involving activation of C-X and C-H bonds.
Embraces subjects ranging from bio-organic/natural products through organometallics to aspects of organic polymers, natural or man-made.
