The Lady Edith Wolfson Fellowship Programme attracts and develops the careers of outstanding young Clinical and Non-Clinical researchers. The programme is funded by the MND Association as part of their aim to train and retain the ‘brightest and best’ laboratory and clinical researchers, to create future scientific leaders in the field of MND Research.
Professor Andrew Lawrence from the School of Chemistry has been announced as a finalist in the UK Blavatnik Awards 2023. This adds to his impressive accolades including being awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Grant in 2021, an EPSRC New Horizons Grant in 2020 and the BMOS-RSC Young Investigator Distinction Award in 2018. This is the second year in a row that a School of Chemistry researcher has been named a finalist, following Professor Stephen Thomas in 2022.
School of Chemistry graduate Dr Ellie Tanaka recently won the 2022 Fraser and Norma Stoddart PhD Prize in recognition of her exceptional research accomplishments and contributions to the life of students in the School.
The study, published in The Journal of Pathology: Clinical Research, found evidence of the disease in one patient 14 years before they went on to develop the condition.
The researchers suggest it could be possible to detect motor neuron disease (MND) and take action long before the brain is affected by taking a small gut biopsy or stool sample.
Professor Alison Hulme at University of Edinburgh, explains that the same process applies in click chemistry. "Two chemical partners are perfectly designed to match each other so that when they come into contact with each other in the right environment, they just click together," she told BBC News. But at first it could not be used in living cells - essential for understanding disease - because it involved the use of copper which kills cells. Professor Bertozzi's ground-breaking discovery made click chemistry work in living cells.
Congratulations to Dr Andres Garcia Dominguez, formerly of the Lloyd-Jones group, who has been awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF).
By looking at how, where and why this build-up happens, the work provides unique insight into a key biological process driving Parkinson’s.
The aldol reaction is amongst the oldest and most established reactions in organic chemistry. However, despite being an intensive area of research, access to aldol products, β-hydroxy ketones, has been limited to the use of aldehydes and ketones. Using born catalysis the Thomas group have overcome this and allowed esters and lactones to be used to access aldol products.
Rare-earth element dependent technologies are crucial for renewable energy generation and storage, electric vehicles, and electronic displays. However, access to these metals, in large part due to difficulties in their separation, is limited and is dominated by China. Improving how rare-earth elements are separated is essential to prevent metal supply derailing climate efforts.
Congratulations to Zoe Gidden, who has been awarded a Sir William Darling Memorial Prize of £1000. Zoe joined the Horrocks lab as a PhD student in the EASTBIO (East of Scotland BioScience) Doctoral Training Partnership and is co-supervised by Dr Mathew Horrocks and Prof. Lynne Regan at the School of Biologicial Sciences.
