KMS Prize Winners’ Symposium

Posted on Wednesday 1 October 2025

The KMS Prize celebrates outstanding research achievements by our final-year PhD students in the Department of Chemistry. This year there were four winners, that spanned the breadth of excellent research in the Department: catalysis for functional materials, synthesis of medicinally-relevant building blocks, AI methods for accelerating structural elucidation of biological macromolecules, and the assessment of the environmental fate of sustainable solvents.

Will Butler (O’Brien group) presented a great talk on efficient routes to spirocyclic building blocks for the synthesis of medicinally-relevant 3D-scaffolds.

Jordan Dialpuri (Cowtan and Agirre groups) gave us a deep dive into NucleoFind – a deep-learning model for interpreting nucleic acid electron density that accelerates by orders of magnitude structure solution for biological macromolecules.

James Metcalf (Dillon and Sherwood groups) showed us how detailed physical chemistry measurements using flow systems can be used to provide air quality assessments of the environmental fate of sustainable solvents.

Chloe Van Beek (Weller and Douthwaite groups) was recognised for the contributions she has made to how detailed mechanistic understanding of a catalytic process leads to highly efficient systems for the manufacture of novel main-group BN polymers on scale. Unfortunately Chloe was not able to present her work at the symposium.