Sarah Thomas has been awarded this year's Sir William Darling Memorial Prize.

This is awarded to a student at the University of Edinburgh who by example, scholarship or pre-eminence in sport has done most to advance or enhance the reputation of the University.

The prize was awarded for Sarah's work in engaging the local community with real research taking place in the School of Chemistry.

The prize will be awarded at the Freshers Welcoming ceremony on 12th September at the McEwan Hall.

Nicholle Bell (University of Edinburgh) and Matthew Renshaw (Cambridge University) have been jointly awarded best presentation prize at this year's Royal Society of Chemistry NMR Discussion Group postgraduate meeting held in the School of Chemistry on June 20.

They will now each present their work at the December 2013 NMR DG meeting in London.

Congratulations to Adam Michalchuk whose poster, "Complexities of Mechanochemistry: Elucidating Mechanochemical Reactions in a Simple Organic System", won the student poster prize at the 21st International Conference on the Chemistry of the Organic Solid State recently held in Oxford.

Adam is one of the two students on the Year Abroad Programme who spent the last academic year at the University of Novosibirsk in Russia working under the supervision of Prof. Elena Boldyreva.

The award is presented each year to an outstanding young inorganic research chemist based in the UK.

Ross, an Edinburgh graduate and currently a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Euan Brechin's group, received the award "for the development of the coordination chemistry of phenolic oximes and their roles in the chemistry and physics of molecular magnets".

Well done to Nina Chadwick for winning the (only) poster prize at the conference "Transforming Materials Chemistry" at St Andrews earlier this week. The conference had a stellar list of speakers and it was great for an Edinburgh contribution to be highlighted in front of the international assembly.