This is just a quick entry to mark the end of August and the beginning of the Fall semester next Monday. Although August was really busy for me from a purely personal point of view, science has largely been on holiday. Nevertheless, we still managed to get one more paper ("Mechanochemically assisted synthesis of pristine Ca(II)Sn(IV)-layered double hydroxides and their amino acid intercalated nano composites") accepted in the Journal of Materials Science this month, thanks to the keen determination of the lead author, Dr. István Pálinkó. 

My plans for this semester besides teaching include:
- SIWAN 6,
- annual meeting of the VOCSENSOR project,
- completion of the SusFoFlex project,
- carrying on with the research plan of the Lendület group, and
- finishing and submitting really _lots_ of manuscripts.

I'll keep you all informed here. Until then, I wish all readers a happy, stress-free and successful Fall semester!

Let me finish today's blogging session with some modest bragging :) Today I received the Scientific Excellence Prize (Chemistry) of the Faculty of Science and Informatics of the University of Szeged! This prize is awarded annually to maximum one researcher from each natural science discipline of the faculty. I am honored by this prize and consider it to be a recognition of the joint effort made by all colleagues with whom I've collaborated through all these years. Moreover, the prize also recognizes the quality of the work done recently in our Lendület research group. So thank you, everyone - now let us get back to work! :)

Our third project year took a flying start! I was informed a few days ago that the OTKA committee has decided on 2nd July 2014 to fund our proposal OTKA K 112531 "Interactions between ferroelectric core-shell nanospheres and autocatalytic front reactions - Towards developing combined visual/RFID sensor labels utilizing pH-change based responses". This project will be realized through the joint effort of the Nonlinear Dynamics and Kinetics research group of the Department of Physical Chemistry and Materials Science, University of Szeged (Ágota Tóth, Dezső Horváth) and our own group where I will be assisted by our young colleagues András Sápi and Henrik Haspel. The funding contract will open on 1st January 2015 and run for 4 years with a total budget of 39.956 million HUF. Thanks to all co-proposers! I look very much forward to working on this project with you guys!

This is just a quick note to mark the passing of the 2nd Lendület project year. I'll publish a detailed report on the main results and scientific output of the group by the end of July. For the moment let's just say that I think we are doing OK. There is always room for improvement of course, but research is continuous, infrastructural developments are done, papers co-authored by group members are published and extra financing from outside the Hungarian Academy of Science has been secured. All in all, I honestly believe that the group is on the right track. A big thank you goes to all who have helped our work in any way, and a big special thank you goes to all readers of this blog for their interest. 

Keep monitoring us guys, we will do interesting science in the forthcoming project year! :)

The most important news in the life of our Lendület research group last week was the successful PhD thesis defense of Henrik Haspel on 21 May 2014. Henrik has done a very rigorous and solid PhD study on the effects of water adsorption on the dielectric properties of one dimensional titanate nanostructures, designed and built his experimental instruments, established the dielectric spectroscopy line of research in our lab, published his results in high quality peer-reviewed journals as the first author and summarized it all in an excellent dissertation which is available from the University repository by following this link. 
All in all, I'm quite happy and proud about this :) Congratulations to Henrik, I look forward to seeing where his next scientific endeavors will take him!

The 2014 Lendület grants were awarded on 16th May 2014. I am very happy to report that the Institute of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Informatics, University of Szeged has managed to score another Lendület grant this year. Dr. Csaba Janáky will head a new photo-electrochemistry lab. Congratulations to Csaba, we look forward to seeing more excellent science coming from the chemists of the University of Szeged!
The full list of all 18 new Lendület leaders is available here.

Yesterday I attended the lunch of the Lendület project leaders club. This event was organized to honor and thank Prof. József Pálinkás, the former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the father of the whole Lendület program. We are all thankful for his devotion. As a symbolic gesture, Prof. Pálinkás was presented a unique book that contains the photos of the Lendület groups.

Prof. Pálinkás has surprised us all by presenting his collected speaches and interviews in book form to all of us. A kind gesture indeed, thank you!

This is just to wish all readers of this blog a very happy and successful new year! Our research activity is gaining momentum now, I hope to report many nice results in 2014 so please check back often for news! :)

We have had our photos taken earlier this week on 4th December, 2013. The first one shows all members (staff and students) of the Kónya-Kukovecz research group:

The second photo zooms onto the members of the Lendület group. Actually, it is somewhat difficult to classify people as being "in" or "not in" the Lendület group because we all work so closely together. Anyway, we at least tried and the resulting photo is available both here and in the "Home" section of this website.

Simon Szalai and Katalin Bencsik are missing from both photos. All photos were made by Zoltán Győri, thank you!

Last week we attended the kick-off meeting of our new M-ERA.NET project "VOCSENSOR" in Taiwan. The meeting was expertly organized by the coordinator Prof. Wei-Fang Su and her team. We were honored to meet Prof. Jia-Yush Yen, Dean of the College of Engineering of NTU and Prof. Chao-Sung Lin, Head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. We are thankful for the assistance provided by the students and staff of the Department as well as by the kind help of Dr. Ming-Chung Wu, our friend from the Chang Gung University.

The VOCSENSOR project runs between 2013-2016. The consortium consists of the Spanish company Ingenieros Asesores, S.A, the Finnish company Nanordic Oy, the National Taiwan University and the University of Szeged. Funding is provided by the representative national agencies. In Hungary, funding is done through the OTKA NN 110676 project headed by Ákos Kukovecz. The goal of VOCSENSOR is to develop a cheap and compact sensor for the detection of volatile organic compounds (e.g. aromatics and aldehydes) in a work environment. The scientific objectives fit our Lendület targets well, so I have high hopes for a fruitful collaboration.