Hi, I'm Irem, I'm a first year PhD here in the O'Reilly group. My name is Annica, I'm
currently an undergrad student in my final year. I'm Kesar Jagdev and my supervisor is
Dr Richard Grainger. I'm Francia Allabush, I'm a postdoc in 2 research groups. My name
is Alessandro, I'm part of the iDESIGN PhD project. I'm Kayla Delle Chiaie, a postdoc
in the Dove group. I'm Mat Wakeling, I'm a PhD researcher. I'm Esme Williams, a masters
student working in the Dove research group. Part of my project involves polymer synthesis,
and I use NMR to track the conversion of my polymers at certain time points during polymerisation
to ensure that they reach the target conversion. There are hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts
in the polymers, and we change the hydrophobic parts, we use different hydrophobic monomers
to investigate how they affect the final cloud-point temperatures of those copolymers. My project
this year was on electroorganic synthesis with sulfonamides. When you have normal organic
redox chemistry you use an oxidant or a reductant, which can usually be very hazardous. Whereas,
with electroorganic synthesis, the only reagents I am putting into the synthesis are my starting
material and the electrons, so that then I can get my product with nearly no waste or
just the side products. The walk-up NMR is very helpful because I can just come down
with my sample, put my sample into the spectrometer, say whether I want a proton NMR or a carbon
NMR, and then on the computer you can get the spectrum via email, and you can later
get the results off the server as well. My project essentially focuses on making lots of
selenium compounds as enzyme mimics. Selenium-77 NMR essentially allows me to look at what
kind of environment my selenium atoms are in inside of a molecule. So, what are the
substituents, and more importantly what kind of oxidation state the selenium is in. And
that is key information. You can't get this kind of information from let's say a standard
hydrogen or carbon NMR. It won't tell you anything about how the selenium is sitting
in the molecule, has it been oxidised to a selenoxide, does it exist as an anhydride,
or does it simply exist as a diselenide. So my research entails making synthetic DNA probes
for sensing applications, for use in medical diagnostics. So the NMR has helped me in my
research in terms of making the small molecules which I put into synthetic DNA. For example,
using fluorescent dyes to put into my DNA. They're small, organic molecules, so I use
NMR to determine the structure of them to make sure I've got the right molecule before
putting them into DNA. I'm part of the iDESIGN project. It's an EU funded PhD project jointly
between the University of Birmingham and 2 industrial partners. As part of my project
I have to synthesise compound libraries of 3-dimensional molecules, and the good quality
data that we get from these spectrometers, with all the experiments that are already
set up in the instrument, such as all the 2-D techniques: HMBC, HSQC, COSY, we
can easily elucidate the structure of the molecule. In the Dove group we focus on sustainable
materials, specifically I'll be talking about our project on chemical recycling, where we
can take commodity plastics like polyethylene terephthalate and bring them back down to
their substituent monomers so that they can be re-polymerised to a polymer with like-new
properties. The reason we focus on chemical recycling is because, at the moment, mechanical
recycling often downgrades your polymers, so you can't use them for the same types of
properties due to additives or contaminants from other plastic waste. I'm working on the
depolymerisation project screening different acid and base catalyst combinations using
the NMR machine to monitor the kinetics. I run the reactions in the lab, I take little
samples every hour, make it into an NMR sample. I then use the NMR spectrometer to monitor
the reactions. By comparing the different integrations of different peaks I can see
how much product's been formed how quickly. Our research group does a lot of synthesis
methodology work. So, designing new methodologies to access new scaffolds. We utilise the spectroscopy
facility a lot in our group to gain as much information as we can about the reactions
we're performing on a daily basis. And then we take that information and purify our reactions
with as little time between the workup and purification to obtain the best yields possible.