Find the perfect formula at the next Doctoral Inaugural Lectures

Two outstanding PhD graduates from Leicester will return this week to present their research to a public audience.

The College of Science and Engineering is holding two Doctoral Inaugural Lectures on 11 May from 5.30pm in the Bennett Building, Link Theatre. These lectures, hosted by the Graduate School, see the return of two recent PhD graduates to the University to deliver free public lectures on the topic of their research.

The first lecture, ‘Taming Fluorine: The preparation of a new fluorinating reagent for the synthesis of 21st century medicines’, will be given by Dr Gemma Geary who completed her PhD in the Department of Chemistry.

Organofluorine compounds are virtually absent in nature. However, they are widely used in both the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries.

The easiest way to introduce fluorine into a molecule is to use a source of the fluoride anion since these reagents are generally cheap and readily available. This method will not work, however, for electron rich molecules and for this, more powerful reagents are required which are either dangerous or very expensive. Dr Geary will discuss a novel fluorinating reagent suitable for this purpose prepared from a cheap and readily available source of the fluoride anion.

The second lecture, ‘Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for solving partial differential equations on Polytopic Meshes’, will be given by Dr Zhaonan (Peter) Dong from the Department of Mathematics.

In this talk, Dr Dong gives a general introduction to discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods (DGFEMs), discusses the stability and flexibility of DGFEMs on general polytopic meshes through several commonly used partial differential equation models; for instance, general advection-diffusion-reaction model, heat-conduction model. He also discusses the theoretical analysis and practical performance of the hp-version DGFEMs, which can achieve very high-order accuracy (even exponential convergence) with low computational complexity.

Entry is free but limited, book your place here.