19 Feb 2016
The 22nd installment of the SCI Young Chemists' Panel's popular 'Annual Review Meeting', sponsored by Takeda and UCB Pharma, took place at the end of November 2015. A firm favourite amongst organic and medicinal chemists from both academic and industrial backgrounds, this one-day event brought together a series of review lectures, given by a select number of young UK academics, focusing on different areas of contemporary synthetic organic chemistry. Each lecture was supported by the provision to all delegates of hard copies of all the slides and key references, a particularly popular feature of this meeting, with digital copies available afterwards for attendees to access online. The final lecture of the meeting was an academic research talk delivered by the keynote speaker, Professor Hon Wai Lam, GSK Chair of Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Nottingham.
The morning session began with an absorbing overview of biological catalysis for organic chemists from Dr Sarah Barry (King’s College London) and was followed by an excellent introduction to organic photochemistry from Dr Susannah Coote (Lancaster University). Both lectures perfectly exemplified one of the meeting’s key aims of demystifying topics and techniques that may be less familiar to an organic chemistry audience. The final lecture of the morning was an authoritative review of the latest developments in organofluorine chemistry delivered by Dr Steven Cobb (Durham University).
The afternoon session centred around the theme of catalysis, with two excellent review lectures on organocatalytic umpolung processes and auto-tandem catalysis given by Dr Chris Cordier (Imperial College) and Dr Jason Camp (University of Huddersfield) respectively. The meeting concluded with the keynote lecture delivered by Professor Hon Wai Lam from the University of Nottingham, who presented his group’s latest work on catalytic carbon-carbon bond formation via organometallic migrations and isomerisations.
A bustling poster session also ran during the day and provided an opportunity for graduates and postgraduates to showcase their current research. Congratulations to Nicholas Measom (GSK) who was the winner of the poster prize, sponsored by CRC Press.
The 2015 Organising Committee of Mark Betson (Peakdale Molecular), Chris Bray (Queen Mary University of London), Richard Castledine (Fine Contract Research), Chris Jones (Queen Mary University of London) and Wes Moran (Huddersfield University) were delighted with the success of the meeting. The 2016 edition is already in the planning stages and is scheduled for Thursday 1 December.
Dr Chris Jones
SCI Young Chemists’ Panel.
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