Shekar takes gold

Shraddha Shekar received the department prize for best presentation after giving a talk on her research. Every autumn first year PhD students are expected to summarise their work so far and Shraddha's performance was deemed to be the best. The judges were looking for both rigorous scientific method as well as excellent communication skills.

Shraddha's work is on the decomposition of tetraethoxysilane and involves using computational quantum chemistry to investigate the numerous intermediate species. After a 6 minute presentation to the department, researchers were invited to further quiz speakers at the subsequent poster session. This allowed those interested to gain a further understanding and to probe the more technical aspects.