It was my pleasure earlier this year to host Prof. Philip Power’s first visit as a Bath Global Chair in the Department of Chemistry. Phil was, as always, a delight. He gave a very popular talk focusing on the fascinating but complex 2nd order Jahn-Teller effect, which was supplemented by an excellent talk from Marie Curie Fellow Dr Maialen Espinal-Viguri. As well as this, Phil continued his important role as a mentor, providing advice and support to our students and junior scholars. He engaged with a range of postdocs and graduate students about their research and began to kick off our joint research programme.
As part of our efforts to enhance the links between our universities, I was delighted to be invited to talk at the Department of Chemistry at his home institution, the University of California, Davis. I was a postdoc in the department from 2015 to 2017 so my return was an unusual, but enjoyable experience. I gave a talk entitled Entropy and Enthalpy in Main Group Bond Syntheses: Dehydrocoupling and Beyond which, I was glad to see, was well-attended mostly by graduate students. Perhaps scheduling it the evening before the Independence Day holiday may have contributed to this!
Phil will return to Bath in just a few weeks. The centrepiece of his visit will be a public lecture on his research entitled Highly Sterically Crowded Subvalent Group 14 Compounds: Unexpected Structures and High Reactivity with Small Molecules, which will be followed by a reception. I encourage all to attend what will doubtlessly be an intellectually stimulating talk and a great opportunity to discuss and engage with his work.
Please join us for Phil’s public lecture on Friday, 7 September at 4pm in 3WN2.1.
Professor Philip Power is Distinguished Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of California, Davis, and a 2017/2018 Global Chair at Bath.
This blog post is contributed by Dr David Liptrot from the Department of Chemistry at Bath.
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