We didn't win

You may remember that in last month’s editorial I told you that Chemistry World had been shortisted for the best specialist site for journalism in the Online Media Awards and that we’d find out at an awards ceremony on 12 June whether or not we had won. It’s only fair that I keep you up to date and confirm that, while we very much enjoyed the evening, we didn’t win the award. Interestingly, however, we received the biggest cheer of the night. The funny thing is that I’m not too sure why this happened. My theory is that people were surprised to see us there; at the end of the day we were probably the only non-commercial publisher in attendance (most of the others were well known, big publishing houses such as e-map, Bauer and Hearts) and a very niche one  when compared with the likes of the New York Times, BBC, Channel 4 and Al-Jazeera. In any case, we continue undeterred and, who knows, we may get recognised next year…

Talking of awards, it is time to announce the winner of the Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2013. As you know, this prize is awarded annually to recognise an individual’s contribution to the commercialisation of chemistry research and, on this occasion, it has gone to Chad Mirkin from Northwestern University, US, ‘for his scientific and academic achievements involving spherical nucleic acid (SNA) nanoparticle conjugates’. 

Mirkin is director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology and is a member of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He has more than 900 patents to his name and has founded four spin-out companies. In case you are not familiar with his work, SNAs are short DNA and RNA strands attached to a nanoparticle core and have been licensed for hundreds of products, including new diagnostic tools for cancer screening and gene therapy drugs.

Mirkin joins an illustrious and ever growing group of chemists to have received the award, with recent awardees including Paul Workman from the Institute of Cancer Research, London (2012?winner), Karl Coleman from Durham Graphene Science (2011?winner) and Hagan Bayley from Oxford Nanopore (2009?winner). Although nominations have been open to international applications for a couple of years, this is the first time it has been awarded to a non-UK researcher, thus recognising the international reach and influence of Chemistry World.

Remuneration survey 2013

This summer the RSC  will be running the 40th edition of Trends, an authoritative report on salaries in the chemical sciences. This report is a valuable resource for those actively managing their careers or contemplating job moves, but also to the wider chemical sciences community as the information collected will be used by employers in a wide range of sectors as a standard to benchmark salaries. The quality of this information is entirely dependant on the contribution of the community so we would very much like to encourage you to take part by completing a simple questionnaire which is open until 14 July 2013 and takes just minutes to complete. 

The final report will be available in September 2013 but the Chemistry World team will also be crunching the data and presenting the highlights in our Jobs section before the end of the year. Thanks for taking part.