Cardiff School of Chemistry

The Cardiff School of Chemistry has received a strong rating in the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise

Cardiff is currently the only Welsh university playing a part in a major new UK initiative working towards the production of clean, low cost, sustainable hydrogen energy. 

Professor Wyn Roberts has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Cardiff University in recognition of the wide-ranging contributions that he has made to research, education, administration and scholarship within the university since he arrived in Cardiff as Professor of Chemistry in 1979.

Cardiff University has established the Cardiff Catalysis Institute (CCI) within the School of Chemistry.

The A.G. Evans medal commemorates the life and work of the distinguished scientist who led the Chemistry Department at Cardiff from 1952 until 1979. This year it was awarded to Professor M. W. Roberts at a seminar held in his honour and attended by Professor Evans daughter and son in law and some of the top scientists in the field of surface science and catalysis.

A major research grant, awarded to scientists at Cardiff University, will further the development of a novel tool to understand the causes of human diseases.

Professor Neil McKeown has just won the RSC/Society of Chemical Industry Beilby Medal and Prize for 2008, for "outstanding achievements in materials chemistry".

Professor Kenneth Harris has been elected as a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

A research team led by Professor Graham Hutchings has been awarded a major research grant to target technology for the conversion of methane to chemicals.

Dr Albert Carley and Prof. Mike Bowker have been awarded a 4-year EPSRC grant to provide UK university research groups with access to facilities for XPS surface analysis.

Schoolchildren from across Britain have taken part in a chemistry workshop at the University designed to encourage interest in the subject and address the growing shortage of scientists in the UK.

Professor Barry Carpenter has been awarded the 2008/9 Sir Christopher Ingold Lectureship of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Professor David Knight has been awarded the 2006 Industrially-sponsored Award in Heterocyclic Chemistry of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Dr Zhongfu Zhou, who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the research group of Professor Kenneth Harris, has been awarded the Computational Physics Thesis Prize of the Institute of Physics for 2005/6.

The School of Chemistry's Cardiff Centre for Physical Organic Chemistry was officially opened by Nobel Laureate, Professor Robert Grubbs.

Nobel Laureate Professor Dr Robert Huber has joined Cardiff University. Professor Huber of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany will spearhead the development of Structural Biology, part of a university-wide initiative in Chemical Biology, on a part-time basis. Professor Huber was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Johann Deisenhofer and Hartmut Michel) for the determination of the 3-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre.

As described in an article featured by the Royal Society of Chemistry, Simon Pope has designed a europium-containing luminescent sensor that can selectively detect the presence of zinc in physiologically modelled conditions.

Professor Gabor Somorjai (pictured right) and Professor Sir John Meurig Thomas FRS (pictured left), both of whom are Honorary Fellows of the University, have jointly carried out the official opening of the Wolfson Laboratory for Nanoscience in the School of Chemistry.

Professor Kenneth Harris has been awarded the 2007/2008 Tilden Medal by the Royal Society of Chemistry.