Mentor of the year is a nationwide contest awarded to outstanding scientists and mentors of PhD students and postdoc researchers. Among 27 nominees the Ru-team Iztok Turel has made it into the ‘Top 5’ final stage of the Mentor of the year 2015 contest together with esteemed collegues (photo link)

• dr. Štefan Bojnec (Faculty of management of the University of Primorska, Koper),
• dr. Bogdan Filipič (Dept. of Intelligent Systems, Institute Jožef Stefan, Ljubljana),
• dr. Gregor Serša (Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana) and
• dr. Barbara Simončič (Chair of Textile and Clothing Engineering, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Ljubljana).

Congratulations to the winner prof. dr. Barbara Simončič and all fellow nominees.

Check out the photos of the event.

The Turel group welcomes the new guest team member, BSc student Sara Moreno Da Silva. Sara joins us for a 10-month Erasmus study exchange from Universidad Complutense de Madrid – Facultad de Ciencias Químicas. At her home institution Sara is completing her 4^th year of the Chemistry programme with a focus on inorganic chemistry and biochemistry. At the Turel group she will be starting her training in synthethic ruthenium chemistry on the subject of 8-hydroxyquinoline and β-diketone complexes while attending several courses at the FKKT and planning her own research project which is expected to kick-off in January.

On Nov. 4^th Katja Traven gave birth to her second child, a baby-boy named Izak. The Ru-team congratulates both parents and wishes them all the best.

Spectral data: ¹H NMR (D₂O, 500,10 MHz): δ 4.11. (s, m, J (Katja,Aleš) = 2 Hz), ESI-HRMS (CH₃CN) m/z for M⁺ (g, found (calcd)): 3760.0 (3760.0), IR (cm⁻¹, ATR): 53

The Turel group welcomes the new guest team member, postdoc Zoran Kokan. Zoran started his one-month secondment on the 1st of October arriving from the Srećko Kirin Group from the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia. His stay is supported by the Slovenian-Croatian bilateral project entitled ”Catalytic and biological properties of metal complexes of nitrogen ligands”. Zoran’s main field of research is the bioinspired asymmetric catalysis using aminoacid derived pyridyl and phosphine ligands for stereoselective chemical transformations.