McMaster Students Win Big at 51st Southern Ontario Undergraduate Student Chemistry Conference

Hearty congratulations the undergraduate thesis students who participated in the  51^st Southern Ontario Undergraduate Student Chemistry Conference (SOUSCC) held on March 25 at Trent university in Peterborough. At this conference, students got the opportunity to share their 4^th year thesis projects and experiences with their peers at other institutions, and learn about research in chemistry happening across Southern Ontario. This year, 16 students from McMaster enrolled in Chemistry, Chemical Biology and Sustainable Chemistry representing 8 different research groups participated to give both oral presentations and poster presentations on their 4G12 projects.

There were over 200 students in attendance this year from 14 different universities, and awards were given to the top 2 oral presentations in each division. Particular congratulations go out to the 3 McMaster students who won awards for their oral presentations.

• Liam Wittenberg out of Mike Brook’s group won 1^st place in the Polymer and Materials Chemistry division for his talk titled “A Combination of Click Chemistry and Natural Crosslinkers to create Silicone Elastomers”
• Olivia Velenosi out of Gillian Goward’s group won 1^st place in the Inorganic Chemistry division for her talk titled “Utilizing Ex-Situ Solid State NMR to Investigate the Effects of Gallium Doping in Sodium-ion Battery Cathode Material: Sodium Vanadium Fluorophosphate”
• Thomas Kalab out of Yurij Mozharivskyj’s group won 2^nd place in the Inorganic Chemistry division for his talk titled “GeTe Phases with Intermediate Structures: A way to Optimize Room-Temperature Performance of GeTe”