CiTOS was well represented this year at the annual Merck Organic Chemistry Symposium (MOCS), at Blankenberge. Our work was shared with the Belgian science community through six poster presentations and an oral presentation by Pauline Bianchi. We are very proud of the CiTOS committee and hope to be back next year to share more science!

It is again time for goodbyes, and this time it is Romain (“Romodo”) who is off! Dr. Morodo will be taking up a postdoctoral position in the lab of Prof. Robert M. Waymouth at the University of Stanford, with the support of the prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the Belgian American Education Foundation (B.A.E.F).

He shall be missed, but we’re very excited for this amazing opportunity and wish him the best of luck in his new adventures overseas!

We’re very happy to share that Romain defended his thesis entitled “Taming reactive (poly)alcohol derivatives in continuous flow chemistry”. Romain’s work was part of the IN FLOW R&D project involving 4 cutting-edge partners from the Euregio Meuse-Rhine for the formulation, characterization and engineering of biochemical products.

His work resulted in multiple publications as well as a research stay at the lab of Dr. Feringa in the University of Groningen. 

We wish Dr. Morodo the best of luck in his future career!

We are thrilled to announce that our flow platform FloW4all will receive a significant boost thanks to the Platforms of Excellence in Technology program. The platform has been assigned 1.6 M EUR for state-of-the-art equipment and personnel, funds which will  significantly increase o
ur impact and collaborations with Industry and Academia. This represents an important step in our aspiration of become a point of reference for flow chemistry in Wallonia and Western Europe.

“Jean-Christophe gave a plenary talk at the Chemistry and Chemical Technology 2022 international conference hosted by the Kaunas University of Technology in scenic Lithuania. He discussed the advantages of flow technology for organic synthesis in front of a broad audience of Faculties and PhD students. We thank Vida Malinauskiene, Vilija Kederiene, Agne Sulciute and colleagues for the successful organization and invitation.”

Yi-Hsuan Tsai, known to all as Anita, is the latest postdoctoral researcher to join our team! Anita completed her PhD in the IQUIR (Instituto de Química Rosario) at the National University of Rosario (Argentina). Her current work is supported by an Incoming Post-Docs in Sciences, Technology, Engineering, Agro-Biotech, Materials (IPD-STEMA) fellowship from the University of Liege. Anita will be working on the design and development of advanced, integrated and automated continuous flow technology to explore new frontiers of nitrosocarbonyl chemistry. Glad to have you onboard, Anita!

We have the great pleasure of welcoming back Michele Desiante. After having spent 3 months last year as an intern, Michele is back to begin his PhD in chemistry. Michele will be working on a collaboration project with the CERM laboratory at ULiege. He will be using microfluidics and photocatalysis to obtain organic scaffolds from biobased polyols and CO2.

Great to have you back, Michele!

We are very excited to share with everyone our new article on Angewandte Chemie, in which Yuesu and Sébastien team up to show how flow chemistry can be used to master an excellent but challenging nitrosation agent dinitrogen trioxide (N2O3) in accurate concentrations. The article is an exquisite work, with careful explanations on both the practical and theoretical aspects of the chemistry, including gas flow synchronization and computational probing for the reaction mechanism.

And even better: it’s an open access article. So make sure you take a moment to check it out.

At CiTOS this summer we’ve had the great pleasure of welcoming three university students. Elise Merville (Chime ParisTech- PSL), Marine Brossy (ITECH Lyon), and Stephanie Reyes (University of Puerto Rico). They each contributed to ongoing projects here in CiTOS while enjoying a special summer here in Liege.

We’re grateful for their work here and wish them the best of luck with their ongoing studies.

We invite you all to take a look at Romain’s new publication on the synthesis of cyclic phosphates as monomers to produce polyphophoesters! The article is the result of a collaboration between three research groups: CiTOS (ULg), the CERM (ULg) and CARIM (Maastricht University). It describes a complete story from raw materials, to monomers, to polymers to characterization of physicochemical and/or cytotoxicity properties.

By the way, this article is part of the themed collections: 2022 Chemical Science HOT Article Collection and 2022 ChemSci Pick of the Week Collection! So take a moment and follow the link.