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Grand Finale for the 2011 ICIQ Seminar Programme

2011 has seen many exceptional scientists coming to ICIQ.
In total, thirty six top class researchers, including Nobel Laureate Prof. Schrock, Prof. Barluenga, Prof. K. C. Nicolaou, Prof. Paul Wedner, Prof. Dieter Seebach, Prof. John Montgomery, just to name some of them, have visited ICIQ and have shared their knowledge and research with us.
We have welcomed scientists from different parts of the world; Spain, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, France, Sweden, USA and Japan in what has been a very enriching experience.

Today, we closed up this year’s seminar programme with three of our ICIQ PhD candidates, Isidoro López, Cristina Pubill and Carlo Cassani.

Isidoro López is studying his last year of PhD, as the rest of the speakers today. He is interested in inorganic chemistry and works under the supervision of Antoni Llobet. His PhD focuses on the study of the mechanism of the catalytic oxidation of water to oxygen with aquo-Ru complexes.

‘This seminar has been a nice opportunity to talk about the sort of research we develop in our group and more specifically, the research project I am working on. Talking to my colleagues at ICIQ about it is very rewarding’

Cristina Pubill is a computational chemist working in Carles Bo’s research team. Her PhD is based on mechanistic studies of catalytic boron addition reactions with activated and non activated alkenes from both a theoretical and experimental perspective.

‘I am very grateful to be one of the speakers in this first Young ICIQ seminar. It has been a great chance to present our ongoing research and I hope more PhD students have the same opportunity in future editions’

Carlo Cassani moved from Italy to ICIQ to start his PhD in Asymmetric Organocatalysis under Paolo Melchiorre’s supervision.

‘This chance to share my research project with my colleagues at ICIQ has been a very important experience not only as a student but also at a personal level. I have enjoyed a lot this opportunity to participate in the ‘life’ of our institute.’

Professor Kilian Muñiz has been the Chair and main organizer of this series of seminars.

‘I have enjoyed the experience to chair the ICIQ seminar programme this year. I believe it has been very important for ICIQ to have some of the most prominent chemists visiting our institute and discussing chemistry with our staff. We have chosen a broad range of seminar topics ranging from theory, material sciences and inorganic synthesis to organic and biological chemistry. Although most groups at ICIQ focus on catalysis, our interests reach out much farther. I hope that the seminar series has been instrumental in the education of our students and also in the demonstration to our guests that there are places in Spain that are working very hard to make a difference.’

We can proudly say that this 2011 Seminars Program has been a very successful one and we wanted to say thank you to all the speakers who have come to ICIQ to tell us more about their research. Many thanks to Prof. Kilian Muñiz and thanks and good luck to Cristina Pubill, Carlos Cassani and Isidoro López for closing up a very interesting program of lectures in such a high standard.