Elected Member of the Council of the Faculty of Science at KU Leuven

I am honored to announce that I have been recently elected as a member  of the fABAP and thus as an AAP and BAP representative at the Council of the Faculty of Science at KU Leuven (Faculteitsraad).  I thank all of the fABAP members for entrusting me.

As part of my mandate over the next years, I am delighted to represent the stands of the fABAP at the Faculteitsraad and to provide a voice to the issues that concern many fellow researchers.

ChemCYS 2018

As part of the Bioinorganic Chemistry Group at KU Leuven, I had a chance to visit the ChemCYS conference where I presented poster contribution on molecular beauty. The conference provided an excellent opportunity to meet Prof. Martyn Poliakoff from University of Nottingham (United Kingdom) who is worldwide known for his effort to popularize chemistry via his YouTube channel. The meeting with him reminded me of the importance of creating chemistry related YouTube videos. An old video from of my son (at the time ca. 2 years) pipetting is shown below. Buch of new videos is coming soon. 😊

Go to video: http://www.geoset.info/presentation/our-youngest-scientist/

 

Paper on Polyoxovanadate Configomers accepted in Angewandte Chemie

A new manuscript dealing with the configurational isomerism problem in polyoxovanadates (POVs) has been accepted for publication in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Under very innovative synthetic conditions, Prof. Wolfgang Bensch and his PhD student Ms. Lisa Mahnke (CAU Kiel) have discovered a new extraordinary POV isomer with formula [V14Sb8O42]4-. Compared to the studied isomers in our previous work, this unusual POV exhibits one vanadyl moiety pointing towards the interior of the cluster.

It was soon afterward that was realized that this is not a new single POV structure, but a blueprint of a complex configurational isomerism in POV chemistry. Insights into the relative stability of the possible forming species and comparison of fragment transfer between the reactant molecules and the product have rationalized why this particular isomer forms and what other isomers are most likely to be isolated in near future.

The overall study has been further complemented by magnetochemical experiments (Prof. Paul  Kögerler, RWTH Aachen) and ESI-MS studies (Prof. Schalley, FU Berlin).