Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow Conference


With support from the Mid-Southern Counties Local Section of the Royal Society of Chemistry, we held the first annual Faculty of Natural and Environmental Sciences Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow Conference on Tuesday 3rd June, at the NOC in Southampton. The conference was an opportunity to hear about the wide ranging science being carried out in the faculty and to implement the principles of the concordat and recognise and support the work of the early career members of the faculty. The conference was a great success with a series of high quality talks and a vibrant poster session.

There was good interest in the RSC stand, particularly from the many scientists not directly associated with the chemistry department. One thing that became clear throughout the day is the large amount of synthetic and analytical chemistry used in the research in both the centre for biological sciences and ocean and earth sciences. These are therefore centres of highly trained chemical scientists that may not be exposed to the benefits of the RSC to the same extent as those in Chemistry.

The day was attended by 91 people (predominantly post-doctoral researchers) and contained some excellent and diverse talks and posters from the research and teaching fellows from across the faculty. In total there were 13 contributed talks, 2 keynote talks and 31 posters. The conference is due to be an annual event so this will hopefully grow in the coming years as it becomes a feature of the faculty calendar. Thanks to the kind contributions of the conference sponsors we were able to award prizes to the top 3 talks and poster of the day. The winners are as follows:

Talks

1st – Alex Beaton (Ocean and Earth Sciences) - £150
2nd – Christopher Pearce (Ocean and Earth Sciences) - £125
3rd – Douglas Offin (Chemistry) - £100

Poster Presentation:

1st – Samuel Genheden (Chemistry) - £100
2nd – Pooja Khurana (Biological Sciences) - £75
3rd – Adrian Nightingale (National Oceanographic Centre)- £50



The money kindly donated by the RSC (along with contributions from the Biochemical Society, The Challenger Society, Starlab and Bioline) went towards the prizes and towards the wine reception and networking event at the end of the day.

Report by Russell Minns