June 30 brought us the end of semester activity. CiTOS members brought food from their countries to origin to share with the rest. Argentina, Poland, Bari, and Venice, Portugal, UK and Belgium all had a small representation on our table. Overall, it was a wonderful day, full of fun, games, good food, and sun.

With June comes summer and the time for the yearly Chemistry Day here at the University of Liege.
CiTOS doctoral students had the opportunity to share posters explaining their work to other members of the faculty, and to learn about the research being conducted here at ULg by other PhD students. Our postdoc Anita gave a great talk explaining her journey to ULg and her advancements in nitrosocarbonyl chemistry. And the entire day ended with an excellent BBQ shared with all our dear colleagues.

Very happy to officially announce that we were granted a prestigious Advanced Wel-T grant of 1.4 M EUR over 4 years. It feeds upon preliminary work preformed by PhD student Pauline Bianchi and will strengthen the automation/computation/Machine Learning ambitions at CiTOS. A huge congratulations to JC, and also to the team at CiTOS, for all the great work leading up to this.

A shout out to Dr. Christophe Detrembleur from the CERM for an analogous grant obtained for the development of polyurethane foams.

In search of more info? Check the announcement.

We celebrate today the final event in Elias’ journey to becoming a PhD. After defending his PhD thesis at Chimie ParisTech – PSL, Elias has become the latest postdoc to join CiTOS as part of and industrial collaboration project. His experience in flow chemistry will certainly be an important part of advancing the growing number of industrial projects here at CiTOS.

We congratulate Elias in his latest achievement and are happy to have him working amongst us now.

We’re proud to share that team CiTOS was well represented at the Flow Chemistry Europe conference 2023.

JC showed us how to “Make nitroso reagents great again“; Loïc presented a poster on the preparation of APIs from bio-based materials; and Anita took home a poster prize for her work on the spatiotemporally-controlled photogeneration of nitrosocarbonyl compounds. And the entire team had a wonderful time learning of all the excellent work being done on flow chemistry throughout the world.

Tuesday, May 23rd was a very exciting day here at CiTOS. We had the visit of 20 students of the Université du troisième âge (U3A) at our facilities. All CiTOS members made their best efforts to show our dear visitors the best of our work and the future of chemistry research here at the lab. The sincere interest and attention of these amazing students we really encouraging and inspired us to keep doing our best to keep  sharing the passion of moving science forward.

A few photos are the best evidence of the great day shared between the U3A and CiTOS.

Spring at CiTOS resulted in the arrival of another postdoctoral researcher,
Hubert Hellwig! Hubert is with us since the beginning of April. He defended his PhD at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland). He also worked for 2.5 years at Adamed Pharma S.A., where he began his adventure with flow chemistry. Hubert’s research focuses on the project supported by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “Continuous Drug Substance Manufacturing from Biomass-derived Building Blocks”. He will work on the development of automated continuous flow synthesis systems for the production of active pharmaceutical substances.

CiTOS was present in the Solvay workshop, April 24-26, 2023! Michele participated, Pauline presented a poster with her most recent results, and JC was an invited speaker for an oral presentation. The entire workshop was characterized by excellent talks discussing some of the most exciting advances in chemistry worldwide. We’re happy to have been part of this event and look forward to developing the new collaborations initiated these days.

CiTOS was present at the April 2023 edition of the Corning Workshop! Dr. Monbaliu presented some of our recent work, including research in flow chemistry and developments of the Corning Qualified Laboratory hosted here at CiTOS. He also had a chance to present the launching of FlowW4all, a service platform supporting the industry in the effort to incorporate flow chemistry to industrial processes.

He was accompanied this time by Dr. Diana Silva, scientific manager of FloW4all, who participated in the workshop and had the opportunity to discuss with many of our collaborators at Corning as well as the participants of the workshop.

Today CiTOS opened its doors to the participants of the Journée enseignement secondaire at ULiege. Dr. Monbaliu, Loic and Pauline organized a few hours of entertaining explanations about chemistry for our visitors. These young participants had the opportunity to learn about the work done here at CiTOS and explore our laboratories during both morning and evening sessions.

We wish these young students the best of luck in their future studies, and hope some will come back in the future to join us  in the pursuit of chemistry and new developments in organic synthesis and technology.