62 The Israel Chemist and Chemical Engineer Issue 9 · January 2023 · Tevet 5783 Report for the Young Investigator Workshop 2018 in Oxford, which recognizes the most promising European organic chemists under the age of 40. Closing ceremony Prof. Charles Diesendruck greeted the audience: “Good afternoon, and many thanks to all the survivors for staying until the end of the meeting. As happy as I was in opening the conference yesterday, I’m even more delighted to close it today. It’s been a long process that took two and half years and, in my opinion, went quite smoothly and successfully. We had over 600 participants at the conference, with 115 lectures and over 240 posters presented. This has been a major accomplishment, remembering that the meeting was postponed three times and is not occurring at our typical time. I am very happy to pass the heavy hat to the organizers of the 87th ICS meeting, which will take place in early July next year in Jerusalem. Before announcing the best poster awards, I’d like to thank the organizers and chairs again, from the Technion and outside the Technion, who helped us organize the conference. I thank the speakers and poster presenters for creating fascinating scientific discussions. I want to thank the Diesenhaus team for all their help, especially Tsipi Laxer, who worked directly with us these past months to restructure the conference and be in touch with the speakers. Finally, I want to thank the ICS President, Prof. Ehud Keinan, who wanted very much to be here, but, as you heard, is recovering from Covid. I appreciate his efforts to participate in the first day and prize ceremony. I wish him good health so that he continues representing the ICS in the highly demanding M2V relay race next year. Finally, I amhappy to reach the much-expected poster awards. We have four awards this year, not in order of preference, and I’ll call the awardees alphabetically. It is always hard to select four posters out of 240, but Saar and I were not part of the committee. I cannot name the committee members, but we thank them for their efforts. See you next year in Jerusalem!” Chairpersons Charles Diesendruck and Saar Rahav announced the four best Poster prizes, all sponsored by BioAnalytics Ltd., and awarded them to the winners: “Targeting proteins “hot spots” using structured and disordered chimeric peptide inhibitors” was presented by Guy Mayer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who carried out the work with Zohar Shpilt, Hadar Kowalski, Edit Y. Tshuva, and Assaf Friedler. Cohen) focused on advanced diffusion NMR and MRI to study the structure and function of the central nervous system. As a postdoc at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine under Assaf Gilad and Jeff Bulte, he developed genetically engineered reporters for MRI. In 2014 he joined the Weizmann Institute, where he created new kinds of biosensors with artificial “multicolor” features for MRI applications. His lab uses synthetic chemistry, nanofabrication, and protein engineering to generate novel molecular formulations, such as small molecules, nanocrystals, supramolecular assemblies and proteins, as MRI sensors of high sensitivity, specificity, and orthogonality. He has used these methods for in-vivo molecular and cellular MRI studies for mapping inflammation, multiplexed in-vivo MRI, imaging orthogonal reporter genes, and sensing metal ions. In addition, he used his techniques to study fundamental questions in supramolecular chemistry, including kinetic features of dynamically exchanging molecular systems and control over nanocrystals’ formation. Dr. Bar-Shir won multiple research grants, including the ERC, two individual ISF grants, BSF, Minerva, and the Israel Precision Medicine Program (IPMP) of the ISF. He was recognized by the 2009 ICS Prize for graduate students, the 2019 Krill Prize, the 2014 NIH Pathway to Independence Award, and the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) 2014 Junior Fellowship. Roman Dobrovetsky was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1979, and moved to Israel with his family in 1991. After his military service (1998-2002), he obtained his BSc in Chemistry (2005) from the Technion. His PhD research (20052011, under Yitzhak Apeloig) focused on developing alphafunctionalized silyl anions. As a postdoc at the University of Toronto under Doug Stephan, he studied frustrated Lewis pairs and Lewis-acid catalysis. In 2015, he joined the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University and, in 2020, became an Associate Professor. His fields of interest include main group compounds, focusing on boron, phosphorus, and zincbased compounds and their chemistry with small molecules. His group developed a diverse research program, including transition metal-free catalysis, geometrically distorted main group centers, stable main group radicals, and the chemistry of boron-cluster-based substituents. His group demonstrated the first geometrically constrained phosphenium cation and its ambiphilic nature. They developed highly selective airstable Zn-based hydroelementation catalysts. They showed that ortho-carborane substituents could stabilize radicals attached to their carbon atom and used this property to synthesize the first persistent 19-electron molybdenum metalloradical. Utilizing the ability of ortho-carboranes to withdraw electrons into their cage structure, thus forcing geometrical changes on the ligands’ structure, they developed the electrochemical tweezers concept. Roman was selected
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