UCL Chemistry

Applications for entry in September 2013 are now open for MSc courses in the Chemistry Department at UCL including a new course on application of physical chemistry in Medicine, MSc in Molecular Measurements and Analysis.

Gargi Dutta, Alexey A. Sokol*, C. Richard A. Catlow,
Thomas W. Keal, and Paul Sherwood

Klimes and Michaelides' article on the cover of Journal of Chemical Physics and September's most downloaded article.

John William Draper – When the College opened in 1828, the Professor of Chemistry who was appointed was Edward Turner. One of his students was John William Draper who later emigrated to the United States and became professor of chemistry at New York University. He had a distinguished career, particularly in the new field of photography. He was the first to photograph the moon (1840) and the Great Orion Galaxy (1880), and he is known as the first astrophotographer.

When water binds to solid surfaces it forms a large variety of structures, which leads

to behaviour relevant to many technological processes and phenomena such as lubrication, heterogeneous catalysis and electrochemistry. In Nature Materials, Angelos Michaelides and colleagues in Madrid (Javier Carrasco) and Liverpool (Andrew Hodgson) present an introductory review of the field. The review provides a simple an accessible introduction to the history of the field along with a more in-depth discussion on recent state-of-the-art experiments and simulations. Offering a perspective on the outlook for future research some of the questions the review considers are: What are the main factors governing the structure of water overlayers at metal surfaces? And how computer simulation techniques can be improved to provide more robust answers to this and related questions?

Claire V. J. Skipper, Ahmad Hamaed, David M. Antonelli and Nikolas Kaltsoyannis

Dimitris Sarantaridis, Christian Hennig and Daren J. Caruana

Work published by Dr Daren Caruana and co-workers in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201200226) has been highlighted on the UCL website.

Recent computational work by Prof Kaltsoyannis (J. Am. Chem.Soc., 2012, 134 (15), 6500–6503), carried out in collaboration with the experimental teams of Profs Aldridge and Mountford from the University of Oxford, and Prof Jones from Monash University, regarding the properties of the first reported stable two-coordinate acyclic silylene, has been highlighted in “Spotlight on Recent JACS Publications” (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2012, 134 (17), 7195) and in Nature (Nature, 2012, 485, 49–50)

Dr Antonio Tilocca has edited with Alastair Cormack a theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society A titled "Structure and Biological Activity of Glasses and Ceramics". The issue illustrates recent developments on topical biomaterials, including silicate and phosphate bioactive glasses, contributed by leading researchers in the field.