UCD PhD student captures SFI Research Image of the Year award
Posted November 16, 2016
A PhD student at University College Dublin has won the Science Foundation Ireland Research Image of the Year competition.
The competition celebrates images captured by (opens in a new window)Science Foundation Ireland funded researchers during the course of their research.
Andrea Zanetti, a Chemistry PhD student at the UCD School of Chemistry, won the award for his image: ‘Organic ChemisTree, a Telescopic View’.
The chemical reaction Andrea was trying to create is a known as a Sandmeyer reaction, which requires an excess amount of copper.
The product of this reaction is an early-stage building block of a Lipoxin analogue, which was the aim of his project.
Pictured: Andrea Zanetti, a Chemistry PhD student working under the supervision of Professor Pat Guiry at the UCD School of Chemistry, won the award for his image: ‘Organic ChemisTree, a Telescopic View’.
Lipoxins are naturally occurring anti-inflammatory molecules whose short life in vivo – where the effects of a biological process is tested in a living organism – renders them non-viable for use as a pharmaceutical drug.
Andrea's research is based on making molecules similar to the natural occurring Lipoxin. These changes should make the novel molecules more resistant while maintaining/improving their anti-inflammatory properties.
Explaining why he decided to capture the image of the reaction, Andrea said: “Whenever I went to purify the reaction mixture that I had left in a round bottom flask, the small brown crystal caught my attention.
“By tilting the round bottom flask, I could see the whole crystal structures (most of it was previously submerged by the reaction mixture), and the resemblance to a tree was quite astonishing. That’s when I decided it was worthwhile to take a picture of it.”
By (opens in a new window)@UCD_Research Congrats to UCD's Andrea Zanetti on winning best research image (opens in a new window)@scienceirel(opens in a new window)https://t.co/ON8VVIbhR8 via (opens in a new window)@IrishTimes
— Behnam Rahdari (@behnamrahdari) (opens in a new window)November 16, 2016
“By the evening when I finally got time to work…the copper salts (side product) had slowly grown (crashed out) in the shape of a tree from the green island (my product mixture). The blue sky background is due to the nitrile glove I was wearing.”
November 13-20 marks the Science Foundation Ireland-led (opens in a new window)Science Week, which provides people across Ireland with the opportunity to attend a wide range of events and explore how science is a part of their everyday lives.
By Jamie Deasy, digital journalist, UCD University Relations
