Congratulations to Mario Falsaperna for award of Institute of Physics poster prize at the recent British Crystallographic Spring Meeting
Mario Falsaperna was awarded the Physical Crystallography Group (PCG) Institute of Physics Poster Prize at the Spring meeting of the British Crystallographic Association. This is the main annual meeting that brings the British crystallographic community together across all areas; this includes biologist, chemists and physicists working in this discipline that is crucial to our understanding of the atomic structure of solids and how it relates to its function and reactivity.
Mario is a third year PhD student studying under the supervision of Paul Saines. Mario’s prize winning poster was entilted “Neutron diffraction study of the canted antiferromagnetic 2D layered framework: [Li(C2O4)]2[Co5(OH)8]”. The prize is for work carried out in collaboration with researchers at the University College Dublin, Durham University and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source. Mario started the analysis of the challenging magnetic structure of the metal-organic framework [Li(C2O4)]2[Co5(OH)8], which contains three distinct Co cations, in April 2020 in the wake of the first national lockdown. Mario should be commended for tackling this very difficult magnetic structure, which will be shortly submitted for publication and as part of his thesis.
Overall the meeting was a productive one for researchers at Kent with seven students and postdocs across the Materials for Energy and Electronics and Supramolecular, Interfacial and Synthetic Chemistry groups presenting at the meeting. This lead to a total of four poster and participation prizes awarded to members of these groups. Paul Saines was also involved as part of the organising comittee as one of the PCG representatives; this meeting marked the end of Paul’s involvement with the PCG committee after a decade of active participation.
Many thanks to Alex Stanley from Rigaku for allowing us to use the photo of Mario being given his prize for this story.