Session 146

Are Pigeons Smarter than Mathematicians? 

Dr Anna Roffey 
18:15, Tuesday 6 October 2020

The story of a counterintuitive maths problem solved by a female polymath in the face of overwhelming opposition. With a little help from active learning we will also solve this problem, which stumped some of the best minds in mathematics, but not the humble pigeon… 

Link to the talk will be on our Moodle Page - See you then!

Artificial cells on a chip for drug discovery

Dr Katherine Elvira
18:15, Tuesday 13 October 2020

Lecture given by Dr Katherine Elvira

Dr Elvira is the Canada Research Chair in New Materials and Techniques for Health Applications, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her group builds artificial cells and tissues from the bottom up using lab-on-a-chip (microfluidic) technologies. They aim to use these in vitro models to better understand how drugs behave in humans.

Link to the talk is available on our Moodle page - See you then!

Discovering the Phase 1 candidate CCT289346/BOS172722 for the treatment of triple negative breast cancer. 

Dr Swen Hoelder 
18:15, Tuesday 20 October 2020

Treating cancer remains a huge scientific challenge despite significant progress in the last decades. Treatment options for many cancer types are very limited and is some cases no effective treatments are available resulting in poor prognosis for these patients. In this seminar, I will briefly summarise why cancer is so difficult to treat. I will then describe a drug discovery project that has been going on at The Institute of Cancer Research. The aim of this project was to discover small molecule inhibitors of the mitotic kinase MPS1 as a new treatment for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). TNBC is significant fraction of all breast cancers. It is characterised by a significantly worse prognosis than other breast cancers types and remains an area of unmet medical need. I will give an over of the MPS1project from its inception to the discovery of our clinical candidate BOS172722 that is currently undergoing phase I clinical trials. A particular emphasis will be on the medicinal chemistry aspects of the project conducted in my research team. 

Link to the talk will be on our Moodle Page - See you then!

The Inbetweeners – Methods beyond Born-Type models in Photoelectron Holography  

Abbie Bray  
18:15, Tuesday 27 October 2020

Similarly, to light holography, ultrafast photoelectron holography makes use of a probe and a reference wave to reconstruct a target using phase differences. This makes use of the fact that different pathways for an electron in a strong laser field may be associated with specific interference patterns.  Typically, the reference is a direct pathway and the probe is associated to a laser-induced rescattering process.  If traditional orbit-based approaches are employed, such as the strong-field approximation, for linearly polarized fields rescattering will occur near and on the polarization axis. This will make it detrimental for probing targets whose geometry is oriented perpendicular to the field.  In the present contribution, we employ a novel approach which goes beyond that and takes into account the residual binding potential and the external laser field on equal footing: The Coulomb Quantum Orbit Strong-Field Approximation (CQSFA). 

By studying a variety of atomic species prepared in excited states of different geometries, we show that, due to the presence of the Coulomb potential, rescattering will no longer be confined to this axis, which makes it possible to probe orbitals whose polarization is perpendicular to that of the field.  We also identify the main types of orbits responsible for a non-vanishing photoelectron signal within the CQSFA and initial momentum distributions of the instances of tunnelling and re-scattering as well as assess the orbits geometries. We further probe the interplay between the driving field and the binding potential by modifying parameters such as the field intensity and the binding energy. 

Link to the talk will be on our Moodle Page - See you then!

Diamonds- More Than Just A Girl’s Best Friend?

Professor Katherine Holt
18:15, Tuesday 17 November 2020

Lecture by UCL's very own Professor Katherine Holt!
A whirl-wind tour around diamond's many forms: from gemstone to space dust, high-tech coating to drug-delivery, maybe even a catalyst?
You won't want to miss this talk!

Link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/91892562935?pwd=dTg5L1ZSZmZrVUwya3JncFJvbVl1Zz09

Artificial Intelligence in Video Games: Past, Present and Future 

Dr Tommy Thompson 
18:15, Tuesday 24 November 2020

The term "Artificial intelligence" has become increasingly ubiquitous with gains and changes in technology, although it's rare we know how that actually works.  One of the most prominent areas that AI is applied but is often misunderstood is video games.  In fact, the video games industry has a variety of bespoke AI tools and methodologies designed to support the unique challenges faced in creating vast game worlds and interesting non-player characters.  But in more recent years innovations in deep learning and machine are having a significant impact on numerous industries.  But how can it prove useful for games?  In this talk we're going to look at how AI has traditionally been operated within video games, how machine learning has previously struggled to make gains in the games industry and the new risks and opportunities for AI that are emerging as games are made and played all over the world.    

Link to the talk will be on our Moodle Page - See you then!

Incarceration changes behaviour, for molecules too 

Professor Jonathan Nitschke
13:00, Wednesday 25 November 2020

Lunchtime talk by Professor Jonathan Nitschke (13:00 UK time)

Large, hollow molecules can swallow smaller ones. The swallowed (encapsulated) molecule may be prevented from reacting in a way that it otherwise might, or it may be transformed by its experience on the inside. The encapsulating molecule may also transport its passenger far from 'home', allowing chemical separations and purifications to happen in new ways. Research in the Nitschke group has enabled many new molecular containers to be prepared through the self-assembly of small building blocks around metal ions to give larger polyhedral structures with inner cavities. We'll talk about some of these, and some of the uses to which we've put them recently. 

Lapis Lazuli – Medieval Materials Processing 

Dr Spike Bucklow
18:15, Tuesday 1 December 2020

The talk will consider a process of mineral separation that was documented across Europe for over 1,000 years that reliably created a blue colour for artists and a widely used drug. It will post-rationalize the identity of recipe ingredients and procedural details in terms of the available – mainly Aristotelian – theories about the physical world. It will briefly consider the material’s importance to industrial chemistry in the nineteenth century and the recipe’s afterlife in modern chemical engineering. It will be offered as a case study that questions relationships between theories and practices and between C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’. 

Link to the talk will be on our Moodle Page - See you then!

Illuminating Materials: The Materials Science of Light Emitting Diodes 

Professor Rachel Oliver 
18:15, Tuesday 8 December 2020

About a quarter of the electricity generated worldwide is used for lighting.  Energy efficient light bulbs based on light emitting diodes (LEDs) are about five times more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs, and hence have the potential to allow enormous energy savings.  The key material used in LEDs which emit white light is gallium nitride, a human-made compound, which has never been observed to occur in nature.  Optimising this new material to make LEDs which are efficient, long-lived and reasonably affordable has been a huge challenge, and despite the undoubted commercial success of these devices many aspects of their operation remain mysterious.  This lecture will explain how we can take LEDs apart, literally atom by atom, to understand their structure and how this controls their properties.  The relevant techniques emerged from traditional metallurgy, but are now being used to understand materials for cutting edge optoelectronic devices, illustrating how the basic principles of materials science are vital to the development of the technologies of tomorrow. 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/illuminating-materials-the-materials-science-of-leds-tickets-131624256695

Sponges for mitigating environmental and health impacts of polluted water

Dr Pavani Cherukupally
13:00, Wednesday 9 December 2020

According to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals 2030, there is a need for affordable, sustainable technologies to combat global water, environmental, and public health challenges. For example, the international oil industry produces over 100 billion liters of oil contaminated wastewater annually. The residual crude oil in these effluents is hazardous to the environment and valuable crude oil loss. On the other hand, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are estimated to cause 10 million deaths and $100 trillion in medical costs per year by 2050. In this talk, I will discuss a new sponge-based adsorption technology used to reclaim oily wastewater, reuse sponges, and recover residual crude oil from wastewater to improve circular economy metrics in the oil industry. Also, I will discuss sponges’ design for removing and killing bacteria in the water to provide safe water in medium- and low-income countries like Rwanda. Due to the excellent performance and cost-efficacy, the sponges could contribute to reforming water policies and accessible to people across the world.

Check out the eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sponges-for-mitigating-environmental-and-health-impacts-of-polluted-water-tickets-131623055101

The Creation of Molecular Nanostructures with Unusual Electronic

Professor Harry Anderson
18:15, Tuesday 12 January 2021

The Future of Particle Physics

Dr Harry Cliff
18:15, Tuesday 19 January 2021

Dr Harry Cliff will explore whether particle physics is in crisis following the drought of new discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider and whether we need a new generation of giant colliders to continue to explore nature at the smallest scales.
Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-future-of-particle-physics-dr-harry-cliff-tickets-134153740449?aff

Two Sides of the Same Fish: Developing Tools for Scientific and Social Questions

Madina Wane
13:00, Wednesday 20 January 2021

Madina Wane is a PhD candidate at Imperial College London who has recently submitted her thesis in immunology. In this talk, she will discuss the importance of developing new systems to explore scientific concepts in different ways using the example of her PhD research. Her research has focused on assessing zebrafish as a novel animal model to study respiratory immunology.
As scientists, our goals revolve around explaining unanswered questions. This requires us to challenge assumptions and explore ideas in a diversity of ways. However, with financial, social and time pressures placed on scientists, it is often easier to go along with conventional practices.
In addition, the talk will cover Madina’s work as a co-founder of Black in Immuno, an organisation tackling racial inequity in immunology. This will highlight how scientists can use the same critical thinking skills to address scientific and social issues and make positive contributions to society and our communities.
Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non-UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/two-sides-of-the-same-fishdeveloping-tools-for-scientificsocial-questions-tickets-136420269699

Equality, diversity and inclusion in science and health research

Dr Lilian Hunt
18:15, Tuesday 26 January 2021

Dr Lilian Hunt is the programme lead for EDIS, a coalition of 18 organisations in the life and health sciences committed to improving equality, diversity and inclusion across the sector, hosted by Wellcome. Her talk will cover how the coalition and its members have worked together to identify sector-wide issues and taken action as a collective to develop solutions. She will touch on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on both researchers and health inequalities as an example of the systems thinking approach needed to improve EDI, as well as what the next steps for positive change could look like. Lilian received her PhD in genetics from UCL whilst at the Francis Crick institute in 2018 and has been working on EDIS with Wellcome since 2017.
Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/equality-diversity-and-inclusion-in-science-and-health-research-tickets-132425864325?aff

Visualizing Molecular Structure and Function in Soft Matter Using Vibration

Prof. Sapun Parekh
13:00, Wednesday 27 January 2021

Science communication during a pandemic: are we part of the problem?

Dr Rohin Francis
18:15, Tuesday 2 February 2021

Adhesives at the Beach: Characterisation, Synthetic Mimics and Applications of Marine Biological Materials

Professor Jonathan Wilker
18:15, Thursday 4 February 2021

Writing science into people’s brains

Andy Extance
18:15, Tuesday 9 February 2021

How would you react if I told you science was useless in guiding people’s everyday lives? Your response could be just one of many important points about getting your message across I hope to cover in this talk.

Journalists and editors – including science writers – learn to exploit tricks that seek to manipulate what we pay attention to. As chair of the Association of British Science Writers and a regular contributor to Chemistry World, I’ve become familiar with many of them.

Those tricks have some things in common with what medicinal chemists are aiming for when they try to develop drugs targeting the central nervous system. Communicating is all about psychology. Psychology is all about what’s going on in your neurons – which ultimately all comes down to chemistry.

These underlying phenomena are vital for helping people to use science. To bring a finding to the public, the public must want to know about it. Part of that is about the value of the research itself, but much also relies on the principles of how we think.

Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/writing-science-into-peoples-brains-tickets-132424195333

COVID-19 and its impacts on the atmosphere: A glimpse into the future?

Dr Alex Archibald
18:15, Tuesday 23 February 2021

Looking Past the Periodic Table: The Discovery and Chemistry of the Superheavy Elements

Dr Dawn Shaughnessy
18:15, Thursday 25 February 2021

The Discovery and Chemistry of the Superheavy Elements

Dr Dawn Shaughnessy
18:15, Thursday 25 February 2021

Dr Shaughnessy led the group that discovered superheavy elements 114 to 118.

The heavy element group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has had a long tradition of nuclear and radiochemistry dating back to the 1950s. Some of the most exciting work has taken place in the last two decades (in collaboration with the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia) with the discovery of five new elements -114, 115, 116, 117, and 118. By pushing the boundaries of the periodic table, we can start to answer some of the most fundamental questions of nuclear science, such as the locations of the next “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons, and the possibility of an “Island of Stability” where nuclides would have lifetimes much longer than those currently observed in the heaviest elements. We have seen evidence of extra-stability in the heaviest nuclides leading to half-lives that are long enough for us to perform chemistry on these isotopes one atom at a time. Work is underway on developing an automated chemical system that will be used for studying chemical properties of the heaviest elements including element 114 where the chemical properties are completely unknown. In this overview, the discovery of these new elements and the chemical experiments in progress will be discussed.

Reasons to be cheerful (part III): Climate optimism for troubled times

Dr Ella Gilbert
18:15, Tuesday 2 March 2021

Ageless: The new science of getting older without getting old

Dr Andrew Steele
13:00, Wednesday 3 March 2021

Ageing—not cancer or heart disease—is the world’s leading cause of death and suffering. In spite of this, we accept the ageing process as inevitable. We come to terms with the fact that our bodies and minds will begin to deteriorate and our risk of disease will rise as we get older. Ageing is so deeply ingrained in the human experience that we never stop to ask: is it necessary?

Scientist and writer Dr Andrew Steele, author of the new book Ageless, wants to convince you that it isn’t. From ageless animals like tortoises and jellyfish, to dietary and genetic changes that can make everything from worms to mice (and maybe humans) live longer in good health, to drugs that can remove aged ‘senescent’ cells and defer a whole range of age-related changes, there’s ample evidence that ageing isn’t inevitable—and treatments could be coming to a clinic near you sooner than you think.

Find out how the scientific implications of ageing biology could lead to the greatest revolution in the history of medicine—one that has the potential to improve billions of lives, save trillions of dollars, and transform the human condition.
Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ageless-the-new-science-of-getting-older-without-getting-old-tickets-140584075755

Water Harvesting from Desert Air

Professor Omar Yaghi 
18:15, Tuesday 9 March 2021

Talk given by Prof Omar Yaghi
Linking of molecular building blocks by strong bonds into crystalline extended structures (reticular chemistry) such as metal-organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks has made available precisely designed infinite 2D and 3D materials. The challenges and solutions to making crystalline, permanently porous frameworks, and the ‘grammar’ of linking organic and inorganic building blocks by strong bonds will be described. The resulting structures encompass space within which molecules can be further manipulated and controlled, leading to excellent catalysts, carbon capture and conversion to fuels, and in general, new conceptual advances in carrying out covalent chemistry beyond molecules. Our efforts in using reticular chemistry to create structures capable of water harvesting from desert air will be presented. These include the results of our three generations of ‘laboratory to desert’ devices showing how the vision of distributed, mobile, personalized, ultrapure water can be realized.
Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/water-harvesting-from-desert-air-prof-omar-yaghi-tickets-134174342069

Catalytic Activation of Renewable Resources to Make Plastics, Elastomers and Adhesives

Professor Charlotte Williams
13:00, Wednesday 10 March 2021

Talk Given by Prof Charlotte Williams.
The lecture will describe recent research from the Williams group on developing new catalysts that activate renewable resources like plant derived bio-chemicals and carbon dioxide to make polymers. The first part of the lecture will introduce the catalyses (cyclic lactone ring-opening polymerization and epoxide/carbon dioxide/cyclic anhydride ring opening copolymerizations). It will provide a recent case study on how heterodinuclear synergy can be exploited to make highly active catalysts for carbon dioxide copolymerization. In the second part of the lecture, the importance of these catalysts and polymers will be illustrated with case studies showing the preparation of ductile plastics, thermoplastic elastomers and polymer pressure sensitive adhesives. In this part, the polymer structure and property relationships will be explored, in particular how the precise placement of carbon dioxide in the chemical structures can be used to alter and tune properties for specific applications. The lecture will close with an examination of the future challenges in this field and opportunities for problems to solve.
Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/catalytic-activation-of-renewable-resources-to-make-plastics-tickets-140592938263

Recombinant spider silk materials for novel antimicrobial biomaterials using click chemistry

Jolanta Beinarovica
18:15, Thursday 11 March 2021

Measuring atmospheric compounds as a disabled chemist

Krystal Vasquez
18:15, Tuesday 16 March 2021

To oxidize or protect against oxidation – that is the question.

Professor Květoslava Burda
13:00, Wednesday 17 March 2021

Does a Good Chemist Make a Good Cook?

Dr Tamara Alhilfi
18:15, Tuesday 23 March 2021

One of the last talks of the term given by our very own President Dr Tamara Alhilfi!
Add 50g of X to a container, add 50 mL of Y and heat for 1 hour - is this a recipe for the kitchen or the laboratory? In this talk, I will explore the link between food and chemistry. We will look at the ways modern chefs and mixologists are using chemistry techniques, and what we as chemists can learn from the discipline. The pedagogy associated with teaching students how to be good synthetic chemists will be covered, with some of my own PhD research in polymer chemistry sprinkled in. You'll also learn how to make the perfect Yorkshire pudding!
Link for UCL students and staff is on the moodle page.
For non UCL staff/students, please sign up to the event for free here:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dr-tamara-alhilfi-tickets-134174478477

Mental Health Workshop

Dr Zoe Ayres
18:15, Thursday 25 March 2021

Often there, rarely discussed, this talk will cover some of the key stressors that impact the mental health of PhD researchers, postdoctoral staff, through to professorship. This talk focuses on raising awareness of the issues that people may face, as well as providing practical tips for navigating the often difficult path through the academic landscape, both as individuals and at an institutional level. 

Zoë is an analytical scientist by background, with an undergraduate degree in Forensic Science, Masters in analytical chemistry and PhD in electrochemical sensor development. After spending several years in academia post-PhD, she moved to industry, and is now an analytical Senior Scientist in the water industry. Zoë is also is a mental health advocate in her spare time, working towards improving mental health in research settings, primarily focusing on academic mental health. She raises awareness of the common issues people face throughout academia through various campaigns, talks and initiatives, and is the author of the #mentalhealth poster series on Twitter. 

This event is open only to the MAPS Faculty of UCL. You should receive an email containing a private eventbrite link. If you have not received this but would like to register, please email uccacps@live.ucl.ac.uk