The ICREA Acadèmia award 2013 has recognized Prof. Eliseo Ruiz for excellence in research of magnetic and transport properties of inorganic molecular materials and in the synthesis and characterization of hybrid nanotube-metal complex systems.

December brings a snowfall of Ph. D. thesis in our group: Silvia Gómez-Coca, Daniel Aravena, Sergio Conejeros and Abel Carreras are the protagonists.

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The Société Chimique de France has delivered the 2012 National and Binational Awards in a ceremony that took place at the Université de Haute Alsace, in Mulhouse, on May 27, 2013.  The event coincided with the centennial of the recognition of Mulhouse's native Alfred Werner with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The awardees were

Lahcène Ouahab and Philippe Sautet (Pierre Süe prize)

Samir Zard (Achille-Joseph Le Bel prize)

Klaus Müllen (French-German Georg Wittig prize)

Santiago Alvarez (French-Spanish Catalan-Sabatier prize)

A new version of SHAPE, a program for calculating continuous shape measures
of polyhedral structures, is now available for download (go to Downloads tab).

NEW FEATURES OF SHAPE 2.1

- Easier plotting of shape maps and minimal distortion pathways.

- Distinct labelling of crystallographically non equivalent atoms.

- Custom made reference shapes.

- Selection of structures from a CSD search using stereochemical criteria.

- Generation of movies of interconversion pathways between two ideal polyhedra.

David Casanova has left our group as of July 1st 2013 and moved to Ikerbasque, the Basque Foundation for Science.  After obtaining his Ph.D. in our group in 2006 and a postodoctoral stay at UC Berkely with Martin Head-Gordon, he was back at the Universitat de Barcelona as a Ramón y Cajal Researcher.  We appreciate the numerous contributions and initiatives that David has developed while in our group, wish him a successful endeavour in his new position in Donosti (San Sebastián) and expect to continue to collaborate with him in the future.

Here are David's new coordinates–

The analysis of more than five million interatomic "non bonded" distances has led to the proposal of a consistent set of van der Waals radii for most naturally occuring elements.  Its applicability to other element pairs has also been tested for a set of more than three million data, all of them compared to over one million bond distances.  The resulting "cartography" of the Van der Waals territory has been published in Dalton Trans. 2013, 42, 8617-8636.

Open Access article

An Essay on the symbolism of arrows in chemistry has appeared in Angewadnte Chemie International Edition.In that paper Santiago Alvarez surveys the chronological milestones of the adoption of chemical equations in books and journals, and of the introduction of arrows to replace the equals sign.

It also presents an analysis of a variety of other applications in the chemistry visual language and of possible parallelisms with arrows used in abstract art, notably by Paul Klee, whose painting "Abstract Trio" is shown to be inspired by Jean Perrin's drawings reporting the observation of the Brownina motion.

Go to the article

Researcher Jorge Echeverría, who obtained his Ph.D. in 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Santiago Alvarez, has been awarded the Ramon Margalef prize, given by the Social Council of the Universitat de Barcelona. The prize is given every year to the best paper resulting from a Ph.D. thesis in the field of natural sciences, and recognizes his theoretical and computational study «Dihydrogen contacts in alkanes are subtle but not faint», published in Nature Chemistry. The research was carried out within the Electronic Structure Group of the Universitat de Barcelona, in collaboration with researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lead by Prof. Sason Shaik. In his work, Echeverría has demonstrated that under certain conditions, the intermolecular interactions between C-H groups, ubiquitous in the crystal structures of organic compounds, can be stronger than is usually accepted. The discovery can help a better undrstanding of the packing forces that determine the relative stability of polymorphic forms that are of utmost importance for pattenting drugs.

Link: http://www.ub.edu/web/ub/ca/menu_eines/noticies/2011/12/067.html