I'm excited to be involved in the Dundee Science Festival, my work-place's open day and I'm A Scientist Get Me Out Of Here over the course of what promises to be a hectic but fun November.

I'm particularly excited by the work we've done to put together a show that showcases the process of drug discovery. It was a real challenge to condense 15 years of research involving multiple scientific disciplines into a 25 minute show, but here's what we've come up with. There are still some bugs to be worked out though, so if people have suggestions I'd love to hear them. Hopefully, though, this combined with a tour of our facilities will give people the general gist of the process.

1. How Drugs Work - I'll admit we're going to cheat a little here. We plan to use the malonic acid clock reaction and pretend each turnover is a flash of pain from a mis-firing receptor. The pain is stopped by the addition of a drug (salt, in this case). In future, I'd love to make this more accurate by using an actual enzyme and its inhibitor, but my experience with enzymatic chemical reactions is non-existent. Perhaps someone out there can help?

2. Screening - We'll use the classic iodine clock reaction to illustrate how we can measure signal intensity and/or time to get information on how active our drugs are (of course, KIO3 will be our drug in this case). We'll do the reactions themselves on a large scale, but we will show off our 364-well plates to emphasise the fact we have to minaturise everything in order to efficiently screen thousands of compounds.

3. Synthesis - The reaction of cinnemaldhyde with acetone under basic conditions gives a nice yellow precipitate from a brown solution in a few seconds. I might even include an LCMS and NMR of the starting material and products to help people see how we monitor reactions.

4. Physical Properties - I've spent ages trying to find an example of an organic solid that is insoluble at acidic pH but soluble in water at basic pH. I haven't been able to find one out there, so for this run we're just going to show pH changes using universal indicator and discuss how pH effects everything from solubility, permeability and even activity. However, if someone can help me in the future with this problem I'd be grateful as I think it would make for a much more powerful demonstration.

5. Metabolism - What else but the elephant's toothpaste experiment, modified to run with yeast rather than potassium iodide as the catalyst. Simple, accurate and very visual demonstration.

If you'd like to see these experiments in action, and meet various sciences from across the College of Life Sciences in Dundee, the Open Day will be on Saturday 8th November.

I'll also be carrying out an interactive show on the chemistry of the gases at the Steeple in Dundee on Saturday 1st of November, as part of over 100 events running throughout the festival between the 1st and the 16th of November.

Secondary school students are also welcome to quiz (and vote for) me during the I'm A Scientist event.

If at any stage I look like I'm taking part in Movember, it's because I haven't had time to shave and I apologise in advance for the scruffy 'tasche!

Finally got around to completing the attached report on YMS 2014.

It was, as usual, a pleasure and a privilege to work with a team of fantastic early-career chemists to put on this symposium for our peers. Over 200 delegates from 10 countries attended and The University of Birmingham was buzzing.

I firmly believe that attending these broadly themed conferences is critical for the development of chemists in their early career stage. The sheer wealth of career options available in chemistry is staggering and often you only consider the career paths that your friends and supervisors are following. Seeing the various places your chemistry experience can take you can open your mind to new possibilities.

Additionally, I firmly believe that interdisciplinary science holds the key for future ground breaking discoveries. It is all well and good to keep up with the competitors and experts in your field - but everyone in your field will be doing the same. It is only be attending the talk or reading the paper that nobody else has read, that a truly unique idea can spark in the mind.

It can be difficult to convince your supervisor of these pros to such a conference - after all, it can be difficult to see the immediate benefit to your current work. But take a look at some of the feedback we got from "reluctant" attendees - the benefits are there to be had!

Plans are already afoot for YMS2016, which will hopefully be held in Scotland. So keep an eye out and starting getting your abstracts ready!!

A colleague at Nottingham has just posted a really good blog piece on the role, and value, of postdoc associations.

I've been (and continue to be) involved in such organisations in Belfast, Nottingham and Dundee and I wholeheartedly agree with Alasdair on their importance.

The simple ability to hear the "real story" behind the day-to-day administration of a university, school or college and to use that information to allay fears or correct rumours that so often abound the halls of academia remains, to me, the key benefit of such organisations at a local level.

If I had a pound for every time I've seen seen postdocs work themselves up into a frenzy over such things as "three years and you're out" (illegal under EU law); unable to be named as an author on grants (unfortunately, blame the funding bodies, not the PI's); no corresponding authorship for postdocs (a fundamental problem of REF assessment, not the fault of the universities who have to work within its constrains to secure core funding), I would be a very rich man indeed. It is nice to be able to explain the logic behind some of the seemingly unfair decisions taken by heads of department.

I have also enjoyed working at a national level with UKRSA and it's Irish counterpart, IRSA. These larger organisations, along with their European and American sister organisations give postdoc concerns a stronger voice at the highest level. UKRSAs role in helping to shape and influence the Concordat, to which most UK universities have signed up to, is an example of our collective influence being used to benefit of all postdocs (and, as Al rightly points, all non-permanent research staff).

If you are interested in hearing more about such societies, or setting up your own, there is lots of help and support available. It will take time to overcome some of the challenges and inertia that Al talks about, but it is worth it in the end when you make some small difference to the careers of your peers.

Just a follow up courtesy of In the Pipeline on my post about efforts to address the issue of reproducibility.

Seems like things are moving forward in this area and I, like Derek, await the results.

Also, yes it's been a bit quiet around here lately but I hope things will pick up between now and Christmas as I will actually have a lot of interesting outreach activities to talk about, and I'm sure a few items to rant about will also crop up!