Research highlights, team achievements, and occasional perspectives from Laia and the group.
Congratulations to Robyn Smith!
Congratulations to Robyn Smith on graduating from the University of Glasgow with a First Class BSc (Hons) in Chemistry and receiving the Oswald Robertson Prize for Excellence in Final Year Inorganic Chemistry.
Robyn completed both a Carnegie Trust-funded summer research project and her final-year honours project in the LVN-Research Group, using computational chemistry to investigate catalysts for nitrogen fixation. We are delighted to have supported her research journey and wish her every success as she begins her next chapter as a Digital Consultant at Stantec. See the news in Robyn’s LinkedIn post. We look forward to seeing where her career takes her next!!
A Nice Milestone for the Group: Featured in the Digital Discovery Emerging Investigators Collection 🙂
Very happy to share that our work has been included in the first annual Digital Discovery Emerging Investigators Collection. The collection recognises emerging independent researchers making contributions across digital and data-driven chemistry, and we are delighted to be part of it. This paper was a particularly special one for the group, and Michael did an excellent job driving the work forward, from the science itself to the enormous amount of effort behind the supporting information and final manuscript.
The work was also selected as an inside cover feature in Royal Society of Chemistry journal Digital Discovery, making this an especially rewarding project and a lovely milestone for the LVN-Group. We are very proud of what the team achieved with this work. A lovely milestone for all and a project we are very proud of.
A special mention also goes to the amazing Emma Melchor for the beautiful inside back cover artwork featuring Bayes smelling the flowers. Emma is a fantastic professional illustrator and science communicator, and it was a pleasure to have her bring the visual side of the project to life.
Related article: Nicolaou M., Senn H. M., Gibson E., González Jiménez M., Vilà-Nadal L. Digital Discovery 2026, 5, 592–602
DOI: 10.1039/D5DD00453E
The hero narrative is boring
New article now available on LinkedIn. A reflection on academic culture, independent careers, and the pressure to turn science into polished “hero narratives”.
The piece argues for a more honest and human view of research: messy, collaborative, uncertain, and resilient.
Read on LinkedIn