December 2009

Sharon and John attended the BRSG (IOP) and NMRDG (RSC) Christmas Meetings in London on the 15th/16th December. Sharon was presented with the BRSG-NMRDG Prize for Excellent Contribution to Magnetic Resonance by an Early Career Researcher and gave her prize lecture entitled “Multinuclear NMR Studies of Microporous Aluminophosphates” at the BRSG Meeting. John gave an invited talk at the NMRDG meeting, entitled “Understanding Structure and Disorder in Inner Earth Materials by Solid-State NMR and DFT Calculations”.

Karen also gave a talk on her work on niobate perovskites at the RSC Solid-State Chemistry Group Meeting in Milton Keynes just before Christmas, which she attended with members of the Lightfoot Group.

Maria Baias visited the group from the 7th Dec, performing some 31P NMR experiments with John. Maria is a postdoctoral research fellow at UCL with Ashbrook group collaborator Professor Chris Pickard. While in St Andrews, Maria and Karen gave a talk about their recent collaboration using ab initio structure searching.

The Ashbrook group Christmas dinner (joint with the Lightfoot group and Morrison group) took place at the Russell Hotel in St Andrews on 9th Dec and was attended by 24 people. Thanks again to Karen for the organisation. Click here for photos of the night.

Valerie’s work on STA-15 aluminophosphates with collaborator Paul Wright has been accepted for publication in Chemistry of Materials and is now available online.

November 2009

Sharon attended the Bruker Users Meeting in Coventry, where she gave an invited talk entitled “Fast MAS NMR: Investigating Structure, Order and Dynamics in Solids”, which demonstrated some of our recent work using our new 1.3 mm fast (70 kHz) MAS probe.

Sharon’s paper “Spin-Locking of Half-Integer Quadrupolar Nuclei in NMR of Solids: Second-Order Quadrupolar and Resonance Offset Effects” with collaborator Professor Steve Wimperis has been published in J. Chem. Phys. See the Publications page for more details.

Early this month, John gave a talk in the computational seminar series about his recent work investigating disorder and dynamics in silicate minerals.

October 2009

At the end of this month the group welcomed a new PhD student, Daniel Dawson, who after a degree in Liverpool has returned to his native Fife. Welcome also to new group members Chris Musgrave and Louisa Sanderson, who will be carrying out their undergraduate projects in the Ashbrook group this year.

Our paper (“Cation Disorder in Pyrochlore Ceramics: 89Y MAS NMR and First-Principles Calculations”) has now appeared in J. Phys. Chem. C. Congratulations to Simon, Martin and Karen for their hard work. See the Publications page for more detail.

September 2009

Posters presented at Chamonix

John     “An Investigation of Dynamics and Disorder in Synthetic and Natural Inner-Earth

             Materials using First-Principles Calculations and Solid-State NMR”

Karen   “A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Structural Characterisation of NaNbO3”

Diego   “Chemical Shift Anisotropy Amplification Methods and DFT Calculations for the

             Structural Characterization of Materials in the Solid State”

Martin   “Investigating Disorder in Pyrochlore Materials by MAS NMR and First-Principles

             Calculations”

Valerie  “Solid-State NMR Investigation into Local Structure and Order in the    

             Aluminophosphate Version of STA-2 (SAT)”

Lucy     “An Investigation into 17O Solid-State NMR of Microporous Materials using

             Ionothermal Synthesis”

A paper by Simon, Martin, Karen and Sharon (“Cation Disorder in Pyrochlore Ceramics: 89Y MAS NMR and First-Principles Calculations”) has been accepted for publication in J. Phys. Chem. C. Congratulations in particular to Simon, who carried out much of this work in his undergraduate project.

Congratulations to former project students Simon Reader and Andrew Miller, who both got married over the summer! We wish them well in the future.

August 2009

Sharon has just returned from the CASTEP workshop where she gave lectures on the theory of solid-state NMR and the applications of first-principles calculations to her work. The meeting was aimed at both theorists and experimentalists and involved hands-on experience of using CASTEP. Further material from the workshop will be available online soon. July 2009

Congratulations to Sharon who has been promoted to Reader (from 1st August 2009) and has also been awarded the BRSG-NMRDG Prize for Excellent Contribution to Magnetic Resonance by an Early Career Researcher (by the RSC and IOP). She will accept the award and give a Prize lecture at the BSRG Christmas Meeting in London in December.

Congratulations also to John who won the prize for the best oral presentation prize at the recent NMRDG meeting for postgraduates and early career researchers in Manchester. In recognition for this John has also been invited to give an oral presentation at the NMRDG Christmas Meeting in London in December.

Diego’s paper “Multinuclear Magnetic Resonance and DFT Studies of the Poly(chlorofluororethylene-alt-ethyl vinyl ether) Copolymers” with Dr Phillip Wormald is now published online in Macromolecules. See the Publications page for more details.

John and Sharon have recently spent a week in the laboratory of Professor Jean-Paul Amoureux in Lille, where they used the 800 MHz spectrometer. Thanks to Jean-Paul and the group in Lille (Julien, Laurent and Olivier) for the help and hospitality during their stay. For photos from their stay, click here.

June 2009

There have been a number of visitors to the group recently, including Professor Chris Pickard and Dr Maria Baias (UCL) and also Dr Karl Whittle (ANSTO, Australia), who visited to discuss ongoing collaborations with the group.

Sharon has recently returned form the 92nd Canadian Chemical Conference in Hamilton, Ontario, where she gave an invited keynote talk entitled “Investigating Structure, Order and Dynamics in the Solid State using Multinuclear NMR and First-Principles Calculations” in the NMR of Materials Session. See the photos page for further pictures of the trip.

Further congratulations to Lucy and Andrew who completed their undergraduate projects in the group. Both obtained excellent marks and Andrew was awarded the Physical Chemistry Project prize. We wish both of them all the best for their final year of study in St Andrews. Lucy is staying with the group over the summer to continue her work investigating 17O NMR of ionothermal aluminophosphates.

May 2009

Sharon attended the 2009 ScotCHEM computational symposium at Heriot-Watt University on  13 May. Also attending from St Andrews were Professor Doug Philp, Professor Michael Buhl, Dr Tanja van Mourik, Dr Herbert Fruchtl and Dr Tomas Lebl. 

Congratulations to Lucy and Andrew who handed in their undergraduate project reports this week. Lucy’s was entitled “An Investigation of the 17O Solid-State NMR of Microporous Framework Materials” while Andrew worked on “An Investigation into the Structure and Dynamics of Hydroxyl-Humite Minerals Using Solid-State 2H NMR”. Good luck to both in their exams.

Sharon and John’s recent work “Transformation of AlPO-53 to JDF-2: Reversible Dehydration of a Templated Aluminophosphate Studied by MAS NMR and Diffraction” written with collaborators Dr Richard Walton (Warwick) and Professor Stephen Wimperis (Glasgow) has been accepted for publication in J. Phys. Chem. C. Also accepted for publication in Progress in NMR Spectroscopy is Sharon’s paper “Second-Order Cross-Term Interactions in High-Resolution MAS NMR of Quadrupolar Nuclei”, also with collaborators in Glasgow. See the Publications page for more details.

April 2009

Sharon has co-authored (with Professor Steve Wimperis from Glasgow) two articles for the newly updated Encylopedia of Magnetic Resonance entitled “Advances in STMAS” and “Quadrupolar Coupling: An Introduction and Crystallographic Aspects”.

Professor Mark Smith (University of Warwick) came to visit the group in early April. Mark gave an excellent talk about recent NMR developments at Warwick and spent time chatting to all of the group members.

Another visitor was Professor Malcolm Levitt FRS (University of Southampton) who gave a talk in the Magnetic Resonance Seminar series entitled “Singlet Nuclear Magnetic Resonance”.

March 2009

Sharon, John, Karen and Diego attended the 50th ENC Conference in Asilomar, California in the last week of March. Congratulations to Karen who received a prestigious bursary to attend the event. John, Karen and Diego presented posters on their work. Prior to the conference all three braved the snowy wilds of Yosemite for a holiday, before the hard work started. See here for pictures of the trip.

The group was recently visited by Dr Dinu Iuga (the recently-appointed manager of the new 850 MHz solid-state NMR facility, based at the University of Warwick) to discuss the use of high-field NMR in their work. The new spectrometer should be installed in summer 2009.

Sharon visited Glasgow on 9th February for discussions with collaborators Richard Walton (University of Warwick) and Steve Wimperis (University of Glasgow) about ongoing research into microporous materials.

January 2009

John’s paper “Solid-State 17O NMR Spectroscopy of Hydrous Magnesium Silicates: Evidence for Proton Dynamics” has been published in J. Phys. Chem. C (113, 465-471, 2009). See Publication pages for full details.