Konstantin Ivanov Intercontinental Magnetic Resonance Seminar

Konstantin Ivanov intercontinental magnetic resonance seminar series started on April 8, 2020. It organises seminars on a range of topics in magnetic resonance covering NMR, EPR, hyperpolarisation, colour centres and optical pumping, and ZULF NMR. The emphasis of the talks are on both methods and applications and a perspective on the future of the field. The speakers include a wide range of scientists ranging from PhD students to post-doctoral fellows, to senior scientists.

Upcoming Talks:

• October 3, 2025, Sharon Ashbrook, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, "Exploiting isotopic Eerichment to understand structure, disorder and chemical reactivity in inorganic materials",  NMR spectroscopy provides an element-specific, sensitive probe of the local environment, enabling detailed structural information to be extracted. Its sensitivity to the atomic scale, without the need for long-range order, makes it a useful tool to study the compositional, positional and temporal disorder present in many inorganic materials. However, many nuclei of interest have low natural abundance, such as 2H (0.01%), 13C (1.1%), 15N (0.36%), 17O (0.04%) and 29Si (4.7%), necessitating isotopic enrichment to improve sensitivity and aid spectral assignment, or to enable multidimensional and multinuclear experiments to be employed on a reasonable timescale. Selective enrichment can help aid spectral assignment, understand local structure and disorder or provide insight into mechanism and chemical reactivity, but can result in practical challenges and typically comes at high cost. After briefly discussing methods for cost-efficient and atom-effective enrichment, the advantages that isotopic enrichment can bring, and some of the practical challenges of spectral analysis, I will describe two applications of our work exploiting isotopic enrichment for the characterisation of microporous materials. First, 17O NMR spectroscopy is used to study cation disorder in (Al,Ga)-MIL-53 mixed-metal MOFs.This shows preferential incorporation of Al into the framework and a preference for clustering of like cations when materials are prepared and enriched using dry gel conversion reactions. In contrast, the use of post-synthetic ion-exchange results in different materials depending on how this process is carried out, with framework/salt exchange leading to crystallites with a core-shell structure, where the cation exchange takes place on the surface. Second, 29Si enrichment is used to understand the mechanism of the Assembly, Disassembly, Organization, Reassembly (ADOR) method for the synthesis of unconventional zeolites. New insight is obtained into the rate and progress of two different stages of this reaction (the hydrolysis of Ge-UTL and the intercalation of TEOS into IPC-1P) by combining in situ NMR spectroscopy and in situ X-ray diffraction.

• October 10, 2025, Nicolas Giraud, Université Paris Cité, France

• October 17, 2025, Evan Zhao, Radboud University, The Netherlands

• October 24, 2025, Francesca Reineri, University of Torino, Italy

• October 31, 2025, Patrick Wilkus, Bruker Switzerland AG, Switzerland

• November 14, 2025, Olivier Girard, Aix-Marseille University, France

• February 20, 2026, Michael Ryan Hansen, Uiversity of Münster, Germany