Centenary
In a departure from tradition Principal and Vice Chancellor Dr Ian Graham-Bryce personally dubbed all 2,000 graduates with the historic blue Dundee Bonnet in his final graduation ceremony before retiring. Chancellor Sir James Black, who usually performs the ceremony, was unable to attend for health reasons. Among those to receive honorary degrees were NATO secretary General Lord George Robertson and broadcaster and journalist John Suchet who had been students at Dundee in the sixties. Honorary degrees were also conferred on Helen Bamber, Leslie Bisset, Lord Cullen, Liz Lochhead,and Sir Kenneth Murray.
Wounds
The prospect of 'active dressings' to reduce scarring and speed up wound healing was given a boost when medical scientists at the University received a grant of £291,525 from Scottish Enterprise to take their discoveries to the next stage. The development stems from research by wife and husband team Dr Ana and Professor Seth Schor who have discovered three molecules which appear to play key roles in would healing.
VIS
Dundonian and multi-millionaire founder of computer games company VIS Interactive, Chris van der Kuyl awarded prizes of £250 to Julian Laing and Andrew Reid, both final year TV & imaging students - along with the promise of possible job prospects at VIS. A graduate of the University, Chris has kept close ties with his roots in a number of ways including the sponsorship of the animation and electronic media course.
Cranberries
The popular notion that drinking cranberry juice can prevent, or even treat, urinary infections is to be put to the test by medical scientists at the University in a £100,000 study financed by the Chief Scientist Office. Over 400 elderly patients will help establish through rigorous and controlled trials whether a regular juice is effective against a problem that affects up to one third of elderly people in hospital.
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A member of Dundee University's best known "chemistry family" , the McQuires, could hold be the man to spawn a new generation of drugs to treat arthritis.
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Dr Leslie McQuire who now lives and works in New Jersey, USA won the £10,000 Salters' Jerwood Prize for his work on new drugs which could ultimately help the millions of people who suffer from this painful and debilitating condition.
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Leslie graduated from Dundee in 1986 with first class honours in chemistry then went on to complete a PhD in 1990 under Professor Colin Rochester who remembers him as "a fantastic student - very personable and intelligent and an absolutely marvellous guy". After his BSc he was named one of the UK's top ten chemistry graduates and took a Salters Prize for his accomplishments. But the chemistry "bug" was obviously a family thing, for Leslie's sister Mandy (BSc '88 PhD '92) and then his brother Glen (BSc '91 PhD '97) both followed the same path - first a chemistry degree then a PhD at the University of Dundee.
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The chemistry was obviously right for Mandy who cemented the university connection by marrying fellow chemistry PhD graduate Martin Padley. Mandy is now working with a paints and pigments company in Cheshire.
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Glen followed a postdoctoral spell at the University of Greenwich with a trip to Romania where he has become involved in the management of teaching English as a foreign language with the company Linguarama.
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Meanwhile the future for Leslie looks set in the USA. He told GC:"I went there for two years as a postdoc and was originally intending to come back to the UK but I have ended up staying on. It's tough to make direct comparisons between working in the two countries but I guess the advantage of the USA is that younger people get opportunities to take charge and make contributions at an earlier stage." Comparing his experiences at university in Texas where there were 50,000 students, Leslie contrasts the situation in Dundee where "it's small enough that people are really individuals". "It meant that as a student I was also exposed to leading organisational roles - sitting on the faculty board, running the May Ball and so on - all great experience."
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Meanwhile Leslie's work as a research fellow in the arthritis and bone metabolism chemistry area of the research department at Novartis Pharmaceuticals involves co-ordinating the activities of internationally based teams of scientists.
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When he joined them in 1992 he made an immediate impact by championing a new research effort to find a safer aspirin-type pain killer. This work identified potentially safer drug candidates and is now the highest priority project within Novartis Development. Such new drugs could help millions of people who are affected by arthritis and other diseases in addition to having a potential market of billions of dollars.
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Early in his industrial career Leslie led a large interdisciplinary programme directed at the inhibition of T-cell proliferation which resulted in a compound being tested for both arthritis and transplant rejection. More recently he has been involved in two discovery programmes involving proteases as arthritis therapies…As Novartis said in nominating him for the prize "Les has clearly made his mark as a chemist and is well on his way to reaching the top echelons of his profession."
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With family still in Broughty Ferry Leslie still "swings by" from time to time but the Dundee he misses, he says, is one that no longer exists - his student days and student friends who have all moved on.
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