Jun 2025
Interesting and Insightful: Loren Defends Viva!
A huge round of applause to Loren Christie from everyone in the lab for her successful defense of her viva. Her thesis, entitled 'Developing a Novel ATR-FTIR Technology for Clinical and Non-clinical Applications', was examined by Prof. Hugh Byrne (Technological University Dublin) and Dr. Nicholas Rattray (University of Strathclyde) and convened by Dr. Juliane Simmchen (University of Strathclyde) over an 'interesting and insightful' three hours. The lab wishes her all the best in her next steps as a PhD!
Jun 2025
SCCS 2025: A Resounding Success
The Palmer Lab, and wider SCoTCH group, successfully hosted the Scottish Computational Chemistry Symposium (SCCS) at the University of Strathclyde. Attended by 70 participants from all across Scotland, the event highlighted some of the great work that computational chemists are doing through both talks and posters. The lab's own Natasha presented an excellent talk on 3D structural benchmarks, while Callum, Huw, İlayda and Jack exhibited posters on their research. After many talks and several hours of productive chemical discussions, the day ended with the awarding of SCoTCH scotch glasses for the best presentation and best posters (as determined by the judges and the people), the latter of which SCoTCH's own Malin Zollner rightly won!
Jun 2025
Playing with Proteins at Glasgow Science Festival
Recently İlayda, along with SCoTCH members Raj and Nikita, helped inspire the next generation of scientists at the Glasgow Science Festival hosted at the Riverside Museum! Their stall on protein structure and function attracted the crowds, probably due to all the Lego and the chance to see a protein in virtual reality!
Jun 2025
Your Friendly Neighbourhood ARCHIE: Jack Gives Talk
Last Thursday, Jack took to the local Strathclyde stage to talk about their research, as well as that of their industrial sponsor Dxcover, in front of an audience of some of ARCHIE-WeSt's (the supercomputing cluster for the West of Scotland) top users. Jack highlighted the "growing burden of brain cancer on healthcare systems worldwide", and discussed a potential solution in "infrared spectroscopy of blood samples". They also demonstrated the "importance of ARCHIE" in both their and Dxcover's work. "It was good fun" according to Jack "and people seemed engaged, which is always nice!"
May 2025
It's Doctor Actually: Siobhan Defends Viva!
Congratulations from everyone in the lab to Siobhan Palmer's recent successful defense of her viva. Her thesis, entitled "Developing, Optimising and Translating Attenuated Total Reflectance - Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy for Disease Detection", was examined by Prof. Peter Gardner (University of Manchester) and Prof. Alison Nordon (University of Strathclyde). Her convener was Dr. Aruna Ivaturi. The lab wishes her the best of luck in her next steps at Dxcover!
Apr 2025
Natasha Gives Talk at UK-QSAR 2025
On the 15th of this month, Natasha Sanjrani represented the Palmer Lab and GSK at the Spring UKQSAR & Cheminformatics Society Meeting, held at the Francis Crick Institute, London. Themed on ‘a smorgasbord of science’, Natasha “presented the 3D structured-based benchmark we created, and the outcomes of the evaluation performed on Pocket2Mol, DiffSBDD, AutoGrow4, and LigBuilderV3.” With regards to the event overall, she found it to be “a great experience to present and network with other students”, as well as “leaders in [the] industry”. Her project also garnered a lot of attention – with “interest” in the codebase and the state of the to-be-published paper! From everyone in the lab, congratulations to Natasha for an amazing showing!
Mar 2025
The Final Battle: Jonathan Defends Viva!
Congratulations to Jonathan 'Jonny' Conn for his successful viva defense earlier this month! His examiners were Prof. Mark Cronin (Liverpool John Moore University) and Dr. Tahereh Nematiaram (University of Strathclyde), with Dr. Sebastian Sprick acting as Convener. Everyone in the Palmer Lab wishes him the best of luck in the future!
Mar 2025
Rose McHardy Wins Ritchie Prize
Congratulations to Dr Rose McHardy on being awarded the Professor Patrick D Ritchie prize for her PhD thesis! The prize is awarded annually on the recommendation of the Head of the Department of Pure & Applied Chemistry to the PhD candidate who presents the thesis which best combines excellence of scientific work with quality of presentation. The Prize was founded in 1983 in memory of Professor Patrick D Ritchie, Young Professor of Chemistry in the University of Strathclyde from 1950 to 1972.
Mar 2025
A (MetRaZymes) School with a View
İlayda and David attended the MetRaZymes Winter School in somewhat snowy Austria last week. The MetRaZymes project is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Doctoral Network, a group of universities and researchers with the aim to design artificial metalloenzymes by combining metal catalysts with protein scaffolds. These biocatalysts can then be used in a wide range of applications, and are often more efficient with higher selectivity, as well as being greener and more sustainable! The lab's very own İlayda Tolu is a part of this cutting-edge network, and she had a fantastic time at the Winter School. "It was an amazing week where researchers from all over the network - each with different backgrounds and expertise - came together to learn, share, and connect." İlayda said, when asked for comment. "From insightful lectures and hands-on sessions to snowy hikes and fun social events, it was the perfect mix of science and community. A great boost of inspiration and collaboration!"
Dec 2024
SCoTCH Research Day 2024
The Palmer Lab again presented their latest work in this year's Scottish Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Hub (SCoTCH) Research Day. The standard of research, and presentation, was as high as ever, with some very good back-and-forth discussion. After the presentations, the all important SCoTCHies were given out - various comical awards for those in the lab. And then everyone went for a wonderful evening meal. In all, a grand day of science and being social!
Oct 2024
New Starts in the Palmer Lab
The lab gave a warm welcome to our two newest PhD students at the start of this month. Callum Hamilton comes from a Masters in the Palmer lab to study 'Computational Design of Small Molecules to Prevent the Early Formation of Multispecies Biofilms', in collaboration with Penrhos Bio! Meanwhile Jack Rodden comes from the University of Oxford to research 'Artificial Intelligence for Early Detection of Cancers from Spectroscopic Liquid Biopsies, with industrial support from Dxcover!
Nov 2023
Congratulations Hayley Russell!
Congratulations Hayley Russell on winning the Young Chemist Award at the 9th Winter Process Chemistry Conference – Young Chemist Award | 11-13 December 2023, Liverpool, UK. The judges had received a large number of applications and the standard was extremely high – so very well done! Hayley will have the opportunity to present her work in a flash talk presentation and a poster presentation at the conference.
Sep 2023
Welcome to the Palmer-lab!
Welcome Huw, İlayda, Natasha to the Palmer-lab! Huw Williams is researching “Artificial Chemical Intelligence in Pharmaceutical Discovery and Development”. İlaydaTolu, secured a MSCA Doctoral Training Network award as part of the "MetRaZymes" to investigate "Computational Design of Artificial Metalloenzymes". Natasha Sanjrani won a GSK/University of Strathclyde joint PhD program to conduct research on “Molecular Exploration using Artificial Intelligence”.
Aug 2023
UK QSAR meeting - Madeleine Taylor
Congratulations Maddie for wining the poster prize at the UK-QSAR Autumn meeting at the University of Liverpool on 14th September. Maddie has been invited to give a talk at the next meeting, at the Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge, on 11th April 2024. In addition, you can see her poster on the 20th PhysChem Forum, hosted By AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, on 3-4 October.
Jul 2023
EUROMAR 2023 - Ivan Yankov
Ivan Yankov presented his software solution for accelerating structure determination of nucleic acid-ligand complexes using solution NMR and restrained molecular dynamic simulations. Now, he is looking to collaborate in solving the nucleic acid assignment community challenge.
Jun 2023
Moving into Data Science at Dxcover
Rose McHardy started work as a Data Scientist at at Dxcover Ltd.
Jun 2023
Viva Defence - Dan Fowles
Congratulations to Dan Fowles on a successful defence at his PhD viva. Examiners were Prof Jonathan Hirst from the University of Nottingham and Marc Reid from the University of Strathclyde.
Jun 2023
Invited talk at BiotechX - Dr David Palmer
Dr David Palmer gave an invited talk at the BiotechX conference in Basel Switzerland. The title of the talk was: "Solubility Predictions: a problem wtih a solution?"
Jun 2023
SCoTCH Research Day
The palmer-lab presented the latest work undertaken in the group during the Scottish Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Hub (SCoTCH) research day.