Laura Castañar
was honoured at the 56th Experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Conference (ENC) with the Ritchey Travel Award for her Ph.D. Thesis research on “Development and application of modern pure shift NMR techniques and improved HSQC/HSQMBC experiments”. The award ceremony took place at the After-Dinner Program in Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, USA, the 23th April, 2015.
The ENC Ritchey Travel Award to advanced Ph.D. students was established to honor William M. Ritchey, who was Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Macromolecular Science at Case Western Reserve University and founder of the ENC. Professor William Ritchey founded the ENC in 1960 when he organized a rather informal meeting to discuss experimental problems with early nmr spectrometer and «we decided to meet again the next year and possibly a few more times and to keep our focus on experimental aspects of NMR.» The areas of the Award are to reflect Professor Ritchey’s broad interests in the development and application of NMR to chemical and material sciences.
As part of the award, Laura gave the oral presentation entitled “HOBS: Broadband Homonuclear Decoupled Band-Selective NMR Experiments with Full Sensitivity” in which she explained a novel NMR approach for recording broadband HOmodecoupled Band-Selective (HOBS) NMR spectra with full sensitivity. The HOBS technique allows recording fully homodecoupled singlet signals from chosen parts of the 1H spectrum without loss of sensitivity.
She also described the straightforward implementation of the HOBS technique for a number of homo and heteronuclear multidimensional experiments (e.g. HOBS-TOCSY, HOBS-HSQC, HOBS-HSQMBC, and more) and she demonstrated that this technique had an ample range of practical applications like the direct measurement of nJCH, the determination of T1 and T2 NMR relaxation times, and enantiodifferentiation studies, among other.
Laura has been working as a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Chemistry and SeRMN under the co-direction of Dr. Albert Virgili and Dr. Teodor Parella since Sept 2012, when she enrolled in the Department of Chemistry doctoral program at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona with a fellowship from UAB. She is currently in her third year and expects to defend the doctoral thesis before the summer holiday. You can read about her work on this blog.
