Recently I was lucky enough to get an invite to the 11th CaRLa Catalysis Winter School in Heidelberg, and it was an eye-opening and engaging week, meeting with some of the rising talents within the fields of homogenous catalysis (among others) and hearing from speakers like Mats Tilset (check out his recent article on trans-mutation of gold – a pun I really approve of) and Ilan Marek about their contributions to the field. In particular, I enjoyed having a week to spend time discussing posters with the other attendees; normally this is the most rushed part of any conference, as you try to simultaneously stand by your own poster and see as many others as possible. The Winter School invited flash presentations on all the posters, and gave ample time and coffee over which to really get into the details!

I was able to present my on-going research from my Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (GLYCONHC, MSCA-IF 749549), where I investigate the impact of including carbohydrates in the structure of metal-NHC catalysts. The work is progressing well, and I think I benefited from being able to discuss hurdles in the project with catalysis experts and my peers during the week.

CaRLa (The Catalysis Reasearch Laboratory) is an institute at University of Heidelberg, supported by BASF, a giant of the chemical industry. As a result, the research they undertake is very aligned to real economic and market challenges. We were given a tour of the massive site at Ludwigshafen on the river Rhine, and the scale of production in just the one plant we visited was staggering – round-bottom flasks just can’t compete with building-sized reactors!

One interesting historical note about Heidelberg is that it is where Robert Bunsen did much of his pioneering work in 19th century chemistry and – famously – gifting us with the most widely known (and least widely-used nowadays) apparatus of the chemistry lab. I couldn’t walk past his statue without getting a punny selfie- the “Bunsen Byrner”!