Chemistry lab in Heidelburg
Our lab got renovated recently. It doesn’t look anything like this old school chemistry lab we saw at the Heidelburg castle though!
Posted on 2009-03-07 by
People in Israel
Someone complained that I don’t post enough photos of people! The reason I don’t normally post photos of people is because I’m not very good at taking them and I often never get around to asking permission. To keep my readers happy, here are some photos from Israel containing real live human beings 
This is one of the few photos I took of people while in Israel. Vicki Argyle is on the left and Gemma Christian is on the right.
Vicki Argyle and I on top of Davids Castle in the Old City of Jerusalem.
One of numerous ugly photos of me taken by Vicki.
Posted on 2008-09-12 by
NMR Quench
Our 500 MHz NMR machine quenched itself today 
Here is an awful quality photo I took of the aftermath.
To make things worse, our other machine (300 MHz one) has been out of action since late last year, so we now have no NMR access whatsoever … for any non-chemists out there, this is bad, VERY bad!
MRI Quenching
I did some YouTubing and found this video of an MRI machine quenching itself (MRI and NMR are very similar instruments).
Liquid Helium
The NMR machine was full of liquid helium. The quenching involved the liquid helium evaporating very rapidly. Here’s a video about the properties of liquid helium and a video of a liquid helium fountain.
Posted on 2008-03-24 by
Soccer
I’m out of action from playing sports at the moment due to my silly shoulder popping it’s self out of the socket again But the chemistry department soccer team said they were usually short of female players so I dragged along Becky Brassett to help them out. The games are played 9 a side on a field hockey turf. Here are some photos I took at the game.
Aggression
Here are some demonstrations of why NOT to play soccer on a sand turf!
First up, Graeme trying to get the ball by running through his opposition.
Next up, a girl from the opposing team wipes out quite spectacularly trying to change directions.
This aint track and field …
Graeme … WTF?
Posted on 2008-02-12 by
Sally's inaugural professorial lecture
We had another Brooker Bunch group photo done. This time was by a professional photographer and will be used in advertising for Sally’s inaugural professorial lecture. As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of having my photo taken
Posted on 2007-07-17 by
Brooker Bunch and visitors
We’ve had quite a few visitors to the Brooker Bunch research group recently including Jane Nelson and Grace Morgan. This photo was taken facing away from the University of Otago Chemistry Department. From left: Jane Nelson, Grace Morgan, Humphrey Feltam, Ryan Hellyer, Jonathan Kitchen, Andy Noble, Owen Clements, Sally Brooker, Nick White and Scott Cameron.
Posted on 2007-03-26 by
The communicator
My dear friend Debbie Jordan won an award recently for “outstanding communicator” at the NZIC conference in Rotorua. Here’s the poster she presented at the conference.
and here’s a demonstration of Debbie using her subtle but effective outstanding communication skills 
Posted on 2007-03-03 by
Lehn Stock photos
The poster presentation at Lehn Stock 2007 was a good chance to network with chemists from other parts of the country.
A rather stunned looking Matt Polson walking in front of my attempt to take a photo of the Steel group from Canterbury. Matt used to be lab demonstrator many moons ago.
My fellow Brooker bunch members Scott, Humphrey and Jon getting into the spirit of Lehn Stock 2007.
A nice photo of Jon Kitchen and Lisa McLintock during the poster presentation at Lehn Stock.
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Lehn Stock
I attended the Dunedin Supramolecular symposium and presented my poster on mixed cobalt(III)/silver(I) coordination complexes. The star of the show was Nobel prize laureate Jean Marie Lehn who spoke about his pioneering work in the area of supramolecular chemistry.
From the Supramolecular chemistry Wikipedia page : “Supramolecular chemistry refers to the area of chemistry which focuses on the noncovalent bondinghydrogen bonding, metal coordination, hydrophobic forces, van der Waals forces, pi-pi interactions, and/or electrostatic effects to assemble molecules into multimolecular complexes.
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