Amy Wallace

Christian Donohoe

MSc.(Master in Chemistry with Year Abroad), Cardiff University, Wales, U.K (2014 - 2018)

Utilisation of Sugar Beet pulp for the Production of Modified Cellulose with Novel Properties
My research focuses on the use of sugar beet pulp (SBP), an industrial by-product from the sugar industry, to produce novel biocomposite materials. The work covers 3 key areas – the treatments used on SBP to produce nanocellulose materials, how cellulose is affected by these treatments, and finally the mechanism by which cellulose is reacting to form these new materials.

Research funding: UofE SBS CASE Studentship and Cellucomp (Oct 2018 – Present)

Sep 2017 – Apr 2018 Cardiff University

Catalytic Chemistry
Development of Nickel Nanoparticles for the Decomposition of Hydrazine MChem final year project involving both experimental and computational analysis of nickel catalysts on ceria or alumina with various synthetic methods, under Dr Dimitratos and Dr Roldan.

Sep 2016 – May 2017 University of Toronto

Organic Chemistry
Development of Fluorescent Sensors for Proximally Phosphorylated Peptide Motifs. MChem year abroad project about the synthesis of red fluorescent sensor for the detection of proximal phosphorylation in the JAK-STAT, a biomarker for certain oncogenic replication pathways, under Professor Patrick Gunning.

Jan 2016 – Nov 2016 Cardiff University

Synthetic Biology
Cas FIND: A novel CRISPR dCAs9 point of care test for Sexually transmitted diseases. An International Synthetic Biology Competition, my team was the first welsh team to compete. At the final conference in Boston we won a silver award for our work.

Donohoe, C., Fry, S.C., Whale, E. : Biocomposite Materials from Sugar-Beet Pulp and the Role of Cellulose Oxidation, XV International Cell Wall Meeting, Cambridge, June 7-12, 2019.

	The Edinburgh Cell Wall Group