It is a great honour and surprise for me to be selected for this year’s Fraser & Norma Stoddart Prize. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my supervisor Prof Neil Robertson, public engagement coordinator Dr Jenny Bos, Dr Anna-Maria Maciejuk, as well as my colleagues, collaborators, friends and family who have each played a considerable role in this achievement. I would also like to acknowledge JASSO, the School of Chemistry and other funding organisations for their financial support during my time in Edinburgh.

School of Chemistry PhD students Jenke Scheen from the Michel group, Yuan Gao from the Guy Lloyd-Jones group and Optima CDT 4^th year PhD student Daisy Dickinson have all been named as finalists in the prestigious STEM for Britain national awards.

Final year PhD student Kiani Jeacock recently travelled to Pacific Grove, California, USA to attend and present at the 36^th Asilomar Conference on Mass Spectrometry (ACMS).

Congratulations to School of Chemistry PhD Student Craig Steven, who has won two prestigious RSC prizes recently and also has written a chapter in a newly published book.

Craig is based in the research groups of Professors Alison Hulme from the School of Chemistry and Valerie Brunton from the Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre.

The Garden group have had their work on divalent heterometallic catalysts for lactide polymerisation published in Catalysis Sci Tech.

Experiments were led by Garden Group PhD student Weronika Gruszka. Her PhD research focuses on the synthesis of novel homo- and hetero-metallic complexes for the ring-opening polymerisation of cyclic esters as part of the EPSRC CRITICAT Centre for Doctoral Training. Recent MChem graduate Haopeng Sha & DFT Antoine Buchard also give insight in to heterometallic cooperativity.

An exciting new collaboration between the Campopiano and Lawrence groups has been published in RSC Green Chemistry.

Zoe Gidden, from the Horrocks group, has recently presented her work in a Pecha Kucha presentation for the #Explorathon21 Science in our Lives event. The format challenges presenters to provide a quick, dynamic overview of their research using 20 slides for just 20 seconds each.

Shona Richardson, a postgraduate student from the School of Chemistry Campopiano group, has published an article in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, titled “Scientific writing and publishing for early-career researchers from the perspective of young chemists”.

On August 30^th and September 1^st 2021, we hosted our first ever Summer Student Conference where the achievements of the hard-working students conducting research in our department were celebrated.

Chemistry in Focus (Sofia Bariami, Iain Prentice, Kyle Acheson, Angie Mat’usová, and Dr. Antonia Mey) are excited to share their second video showcasing more of the exciting work being done by PhD students in the School of Chemistry. The video features Sofia Bariami’s work on developing force-fields for use in computational drug design in collaboration with the Cole Group at Newcastle, which was recently published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.