The Dynamic Reaction Monitoring Facility (DReaM) and the Institute for Sustainability (IfS) hosted the 5th Reaction Monitoring Symposium on the 4th July 2023. The symposium was held in the Chancellors’ Building with over 100 delegates in attendance.
After kicking the day off with some coffee, attendees headed into the morning session with talks from Prof Ian Fairlamb (University of York) and Dr Enrico Luchinat (University of Bologna, Italy). In his keynote talk sponsored by the RSC's Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms Group, Prof Fairlamb enlightened the audience with use of infrared spectroscopy to shed light on reaction mechanisms and Dr Luchinat gave an exciting overview of how flowNMR can be used to understand the activity taking place in human cells.
Over lunch, delegates networked with exhibitors and poster presenters. The poster presentations were of high quality, with enthusiastic poster presenters covering a wide range of reaction monitoring topics and techniques.
After the lunchtime poster session, Dr Lorraine Bateman (University College Cork, Ireland) provided useful comparisons between high and low field NMR for monitoring her reactions and Dr Evan Wenbo Zhao (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands) led us into the hot topic of monitoring the chemistry of batteries using NMR.
After the mid-afternoon coffee break, the third session of the day opened with Dr Alejandro Bara-Estaún (Bruker, France) who showed us some industrial applications of benchtop NMR. The day concluded with Prof Jason Hein's (University of British Columbia, Canada) keynote talk about combining HPLC monitoring data with artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.
The poster prizes were won by Annabel Flook (a first year PhD student from the University of Edinburgh) and the University of Warwick's Owen Tooley. Congratulations to them both!
Exhibitors
The symposium was made possible by our exhibitors – Asynt, Bruker, Clairet Scientific, Hiden Analytical, Jeol, Mestrelab, Mettler-Toledo, Oxford Instruments, TgK Scientific and Vacuubrand. This support has enabled us to run the symposium as a free to attend event, which is incredibly important for supporting the career development of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers.
Interested in using the Dynamic Reaction Monitoring (DReaM) Facility?
The DReaM Facility gives researchers the chance to monitor homogeneous reactions in real-time, under their normal reaction conditions, using a variety of analytical techniques. These include NMR and UV/Vis spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and HPLC. In addition to obtaining reaction kinetics, the DReaM Facility can also help researchers shed light on reaction intermediates and by-products.
We have a call for external proposals twice a year which allows successful applicants to access paid time at the DReaM Facility.