The Dynamic Reaction Monitoring Facility (DReaM) hosted the 4th (not-quite-annual!) Reaction Monitoring Symposium on the 9th June 2022, in collaboration with the CSCT and the Catalysis Hub. The symposium was held in the East Building with over 90 delegates in attendance.

After some early morning coffee to start the day, attendees were treated to the morning session featuring talks from Prof Simon Duckett (University of York) and Dr Jean-Nicolas Dumez (Nantes University, France). These talks focused on two wildly different uses of NMR spectroscopy, which gave the audience lots to consider.

Over lunch, delegates networked with exhibitors and poster presenters. It was lovely to have a vibrant atmosphere of collaboration after the last couple of years.

Talks continued after lunch with Dr Melanie Britton (University of Birmingham) who discussed imaging of batteries and Dr Andrew Hall (University of Edinburgh) who is studying very fast chemical reactions. The last talk of the session was delivered by Prof Marcel Utz (University of Southampton) who talked about NMR applications in biological systems.

The mid-afternoon poster session was well attended with presenters and delegates alike keen to network. A wide range of posters were presented, with the presenters ranging from undergraduate students to industrial colleagues. For some poster presenters, it was the first opportunity to present several years of their work and their enthusiasm reflected this.

After the judging of the poster session, the third session of the day opened with Dr Isabel Thomlinson (University of Bath) who discussed some NMR experiments complementary to those previously outlined by Dr Dumez. The day was concluded by Prof Scott McIndoe's (University of Victoria, BC, Canada) keynote talk about CAKE (this stands for Continuous Addition Kinetic Elucidation rather than more commonly known edible type of cake!).

Poster prizes were won by Katie Grant (University of Edinburgh) and the University of Bath's Asad Saib. Congratulations to them both!

Sponsorship

We would like to thank the Royal Society of Chemistry, for generous sponsorship of the event. In addition to this, we would also like to thanks the Catalysis Hub for sponsoring Prof Scott McIndoe's keynote talk.

The symposium was also made possible by our exhibitors - Bruker, Clairet Scientific, Hiden Analytical, HNP Mikrosysteme, Jeol, Mestrelab, Mettler-Toledo, Oxford Instruments and TgK Scientific. This support has enabled us to run the symposium as a free to attend event.

Interested in using the Dynamic Reaction Monitoring (DReaM) Facility?

The DReaM Facility gives researchers the chance to monitor homogeneous reactions in real-time, under 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.