RSC Advances Blog

We are very pleased to welcome Professor Parastoo Hashemi to the RSC Advances team as an Associate Editor today.

Parastoo (Parry) Hashemi received her MSci degree in Chemistry from King’s College, London. She performed her PhD with Martyn Boutelle in the Department of Bioengineering in Imperial College, London where she developed online biosensing technology to measure brain metabolites from human traumatic brain injury patients. She performed her post doctoral with Mark Wightman at UNC Chapel Hill. Here she developed fast scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) at carbon-fiber microelectrodes (CFMs) to measure serotonin in vivo using FSCV. She currently runs two research labs in the Department of Chemistry at the University of South Carolina and in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College, London. The focus of her research is to develop diagnostic tools and novel treatments for mental illnesses.

Parry has also recently guest-edited a themed collection on analytical science in neurochemistry for Analyst with Jean-Francois Masson and Martyn G. Boutelle. You can browse the full collection here.
 

Browse a selection of work published by Parry in RSC journals:

Frontiers in electrochemical sensors for neurotransmitter detection: towards measuring neurotransmitters as chemical diagnostics for brain disorders
Yangguang Ou, Anna Marie Buchanan, Colby E. Witt and Parastoo Hashemi
Anal. Methods, 2019, 11, 2738-2755
DOI: 10.1039/C9AY00055K, Critical Review

Fast voltammetry of metals at carbon-fiber microelectrodes: towards an online speciation sensor
Pavithra Pathirathna, Thushani Siriwardhane, Shawn P. McElmurry, Stephen L. Morgan and Parastoo Hashemi
Analyst, 2016, 141, 6432-6437
DOI: 10.1039/C6AN01807F, Paper

The coaction of tonic and phasic dopamine dynamics
Christopher W. Atcherley, Kevin M. Wood, Kate L. Parent, Parastoo Hashemi and Michael L. Heien
Chem. Commun., 2015, 51, 2235-2238
DOI: 10.1039/C4CC06165A, Communication

Submit your research or reviews to Sonia & Ahjeong now, they will be delighted to receive them! See our author guidelines for information on our article types or find out more about the advantages of publishing in a Royal Society of Chemistry journal.

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Dr Donna Arnold, Associate Editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s RSC Advances, believes it’s vital that scientists contribute to their community by getting involved in the process of publishing high quality research.

Dr Donna Arnold is Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and Forensic Science at the University of Kent. Her PhD, undertaken at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, focussed on the structure and electronic properties of porous manganese oxides. She has since worked at the Foundation for Research and Technology in Crete and undertaken postdoctoral research at the University of St Andrews. Her research on functional nanomaterials at University College Cork earned her national recognition for her role in the design of the first patterned substrates manufactured by Intel to meet key research needs.

Q. What is your personal research focus, and what aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment?

I focus on new multifunctional materials for next-generation devices. In particular, my team are interested in synthesising materials with both magnetic and ferroelectric properties. Realising commercially useful materials of this kind would allow us to build memory devices which offer faster read/write capabilities while simultaneously requiring less energy to operate.

Q. What do you find most challenging about your research?

Research should be challenging. Without challenge there is no reward. That said, often the trickiest part is knowing when to share it with the scientific community. Do you wait until you have a complete picture, or do you share your findings as they come? There are pros and cons to both approaches and these vary depending on the project.

Q. Why did you decide to become an Associate Editor for RSC Advances?

I wanted to understand more about the publishing process, contribute to my community, improve my own submissions, and share knowledge and best practice. I applied to RSC Advances because it has a truly global readership across all areas of chemistry.

My role as Associate Editor gives me an opportunity to see the extensive, excellent work being performed in my area of expertise and to play a part in sharing this work with the wider research community.

Q. What is your favourite thing about the Associate Editor role?

It’s got to be witnessing the wonderful, innovative and exciting science being done worldwide. As researchers, our focus often becomes very narrow and we end up only reading within our direct area of interest. Being an Associate Editor means that I read a broad range of science. I’m constantly amazed by the innovative experiments that scientists perform!

Q. How does your role contribute to the journal and to the scientific community?

We all strive to publish our work and rely on these mechanisms to share knowledge and communicate our ideas – something that’s only achievable through the sensitive handling of papers by editorial staff and peer reviewers.

I hope that my contribution to the publishing of excellent science in RSC Advances inspires researchers and continues to drive science to new and exciting heights.

Q. If you had one piece of advice for authors submitting to RSC Advances, what would it be?

Include a cover letter with your submission which allows us to see where you think your work falls in the field and gives us a sense of the paper before we read it. Tell us why your work is cutting-edge and how it extends the current state of the art. What are the highlights? Why is it exciting? How does it fit within the scope of the journal?

Q. Who were your role models as a child, and did you always want to be a scientist?

I always wanted to be a scientist, although initially I wanted to be a pathologist (inspired by the TV show Quincy)! I later realised my true passion was for materials chemistry and that I really wanted to be an academic. I’ve been fortunate to have had some wonderful teachers and an incredibly supportive family, without whom this path would have been impossible.

Q. Which profession would you choose if you weren’t a researcher?

I’d like to think that I would have become a rock star or racing-car driver – although I lack the talent for both!

More realistically, I would have become a primary school teacher so that I could have inspired the next generation of researchers and scientists.

Submit to RSC Advances today! Check out our author guidelines for information on our article types or find out more about the advantages of publishing in a Royal Society of Chemistry journal.

Harvesting drinking water by making it jump out of foggy air sounds far-fetched, but that is exactly what is achieved by some clever chemistry inspired by the water-gathering exoskeletons of desert beetles.

Research published in the journal RSC Advances reveals how surface coatings with water-attracting and water-repelling regions make water droplets form and jump together into larger droplets that can be collected. The system offers an inexpensive and efficient route to condensing much-needed drinking water from air in arid and semi-arid regions of the world.

Xikui Wang and Youfa Zhang and their colleagues at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, took inspiration from the bumpy surfaces of desert beetles to develop their new technology. The bumps on the beetle’s back promote the formation of water droplets from foggy air. The water is then channelled into the beetle’s mouth, allowing it to survive in the dry wilderness of South West Africa.

To adapt the beetle’s trick for human use, the researchers built a hybrid material by adding silicon carbide particles to a superhydrophobic silicon dioxide coating on aluminium sheets. This created a rough surface with interspersed and interacting water-attracting and water-repelling regions that encouraged tiny water droplets to form.

The water-gathering power of the beetles was then improved by bringing two layers of the synthetic material close together. Remarkably, the forces on the smallest droplets made them jump off the surface and collide. This makes the system more than twice as effective at catching water from the air as single surfaces alone.

Other methods for harvesting water from air do already exist, but the researchers say the new process is easier and will cost less.

While their proof-of-concept work paves the way for building better watercollectors, they also see possible applications for desalination systems to extract drinking water from the sea, and applications in other fields involving heat exchange and water purification.

Submit to RSC Advances today! Check out our author guidelines for information on our article types or find out more about the advantages of publishing in a Royal Society of Chemistry journal.

Article details:

Beetle-like droplet-jumping superamphiphobic coatings for enhancing fog collection of sheet arrays
Xikui Wang, Jia Zeng, Xinquan Yu, Caihua Liang and Youfa Zhang
RSC Advances, 2020, 10, 282-288
DOI: 10.1039/c9ra09329j

We are very pleased to introduce Dr Sonia de Pascual-Teresa & Professor Ahjeong Son. Sonia and Ahjeong join the RSC Advances team as associate editors this month, keep reading to find out more.

Sonia de Pascual-Teresa is a Scientist at the Institute of Food Science, Technology and Nutrition (ICTAN) belonging to the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). She has a BS in Pharmacy and a PhD in Food Science and Nutrition, both from the University of Salamanca. She has worked previously at the IFR in Norwich and the University of Reading. Her main interests are polyphenols, their bioavailability, metabolism and biological effects. She has experience in both, human trials and cellular models to study the bioavailability and biological activity of food bioactives. Polyphenols analysis and chemistry is in the basis of much of her work. In the last years she has focused on the study of the cardiovascular and neuroprotective effects of dietary polyphenols, including flavanols and anthocyanins. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal papers and book chapters.

‘I am pleased with the opportunity to collaborate with RSC Advances in promoting the impactful, high-quality and open-access publications in the food research area.’

Ahjeong Son received her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Delaware under the supervision of Professor Daniel Cha. She completed her NIH-funded postdoctoral stint in Professor Kate M. Scow’s lab at University of California at Davis. She began her independent career in 2008 with the Department of Civil Engineering at Auburn University, USA. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2011. She is currently a full professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at Ewha Womans University, Korea. She is tenured at both Auburn University and Ewha Womans University.

Her research focus includes the development of nanomaterials based biosensor technologies and systems to address environmental challenges.

Ahjeong looks forward to her role as an associate editor, saying “I am excited to join the editorial team of RSC Advances and hope to contribute to the journal from the environmental engineering perspective”.

Submit your research or reviews to Sonia & Ahjeong now, they will be delighted to receive them! See our author guidelines for information on our article types or find out more about the advantages of publishing in a Royal Society of Chemistry journal.

Keep up to date with our latest HOT articles, Reviews, Collections & more by following us on Twitter. You can also keep informed by signing up to our E-Alerts.