There is a yearly tradition to exchange socks and write poems during The Secret Socks Santa game every December in our Physical Organic Chemistry department. We also have to guess who was our Secret Santa after carefully reading the poem. This makes the activity a really fun game!
Peer van Duppen gave a presentation in NWO CHAINS 2021 online conference, which is the annual Dutch Chemistry conference. Peer talked about temporal environmental patterns as driving force for self-organization in the formose reaction. Great work!
Congratulations to Peter van Dijk, who was awarded a Radboud University Bronze Medal! This Medal is awarded to staff members of Radboud University for their exceptional personal commitment and involvement. Peter van Dijk currently works as a prevention officer at the IMM and he started as an instrument maker and glass blower at the Faculty of Science already 50 years ago!
You can read more about the medal here.
And you can watch the 98th Radboud University Dies Natalis celebration during which the medal was awarded here.
Photos taken from the 98th Radboud University Dies Natalis celebration video on YouTube with a permission from Radboud University.
Sphere Fluidics, a company which developed single cell analysis system and was co-founded by Wilhelm Huck, closed a $40 million investment round today. It was announced that Sofinnova Partners and Redmile Group were leading the round. The funding will be used for the expansion of the Company’s international sales activities, improving customer’s support and also the expansion of research and development programs.
Congratulations to Wilhelm Huck and the whole Sphere Fluidics team!
The official press release can be found here: https://spherefluidics.com/sphere-fluidics-closes-a-40-million-funding-round-led-by-sofinnova-partners-and-redmile-group/
Congratulations Dr. Helwig!
Today (25 October, 2021) Britta Helwig successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “From Enzymatic Reaction Networks Towards Synthetic Metabolic Pathways.”
Great work Britta! Good luck to your future career!
Souvik obtained his BS-MS dual degrees in chemical sciences from IISER Kolkata, India and joined Huck group to pursuit Ph.D. journey (from September 1, 2021 onwards). Here, he will be working on designing/ reconstructing multiple enzymatic reaction networks via immobilizing enzymes onto beads to study networks dynamics and subsequently optimize to produce chemicals as outputs.
Welcome Souvik to the Huck group!
Rianne comes from a small town in the Netherlands, called Heino. She moved to Nijmegen and obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degree at the Radboud University. During this time, she discovered the wonderful world of organic chemistry and was especially fascinated by photoswitchable molecules. Therefore, she will continue to work on the synthesis and application of these molecules in complex enzymatic reaction networks. When she is not in the lab, she likes to cycle, play volleyball and hang out with her friends.
Welcome Rianne to the Huck group!
At the Origins of Life, the transfer of scarce phosphate to the organic molecules that make up biochemistry is a significant challenge for prebiotic chemistry. Here we show a prebiotic physicochemical cycle to activate orthophosphate and via a kinetically stable thermodynamically activated molecule phosphorylate all of Life’s basic building blocks. Excitingly, this system is constructed along the same principles by which Life transfers phosphate within cells. We are very grateful to the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life for supporting this research.
The paper is here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25555-x
You can read a summary of the paper here:
https://twitter.com/oliver_maguire/status/1438836473973952515
Today two PhD students Melde and Mathieu organised the first computational workshop ‘Working with GitHub’. Everybody in the department, from student to PI, was welcome to join. Learning how to use GitHub is a hugely relevant skill for modern working environments, and for doing collaborative and reproducible science with a computational aspect, from simple data analysis to large-scale simulations. We learnt a lot and are looking forward to the future workshops!
Today (29 June, 2021) Mahesh Vibhute defended his PhD thesis entitled “Reconstituting living cells. Mobility, reactivity and asymmetry in cytomimetic crowded protocells.”
Big congratulations, Dr. Vibhute and good luck to your future career!
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