School of Chemistry Researchers Honoured with SSPC Award

11 Oct 2023

The School would like to congratulate Katie O’Callaghan, Stuart Collins, and Anita Maguire who received the SSPC Award for Academic Collaboration of the Year 2022 for their work in collaboration with Marcus Baumann at UCD.

The collaborative background

The Baumann lab in UCD and the Maguire-Collins lab in UCC have complementary skills and expertise in the area of continuous flow chemistry, and in recent years have been developing productive links between these research teams to underpin a coherent flow chemistry platform within SSPC, complemented by other teams across SSPC. Future collaborative engagement is envisaged between the two groups due to the clear synergy and complementarity, and positive collaborative relationship.

When Katie O’Callaghan (SSPC funded PhD in UCC) presented her work on photolysis in flow at a Molecules 1 theme meeting, Marcus suggested experiments which might be conducted within his lab in UCD using a complementary LED light source (365nm) to the lamps Katie had used in UCC (mercury lamp and blue LEDs 450nm) with a view to enhancing the selectivity of the photochemical transformation and decrease degradation. Accordingly, Katie visited Marcus’ lab during the summer of 2022, having prepared the precursors in UCC. She undertook the photolysis experiments with Marcus in UCD, then brought the product mixtures back to UCC for detailed analysis and comparison with earlier results. Unexpectedly the results showed that use of the LED led to an indistinguishable outcome to that seen with the medium pressure mercury lamp in UCC. This unanticipated outcome led to enhanced insight into the role of the photosensitiser in the reaction system.