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Dave Adams

@profdjadams.bsky.social
600 followers 626 following 517 posts

I work in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. Interested in gels, soft matter, castles, guitars and mountains. All views are my own!

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Reposted by Dave Adams
John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky
I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful.

Review process

As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking. 

This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review.  Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it.

Feedback on your application

Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage.  To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Latest work from the group in collaboration with Drew Thomson - using AlphaFold to look at designing small peptides that coassemble: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
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Emily Draper @profdraper.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The MASC/WISC are looking for applications for the EDIA award. Have you done something amazing for the supramolecular community? We want to hear about it and celebrate it! Apply here mascgroup.co.uk/masc-wisc-ed...
mascgroup.co.uk
MASC/WISC EDIA Award
MASC: The Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry Interest Group MASC/WISC EDIA Award MASC: The Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry Interest Group WISC: Women In Supramolecular Chemistry…
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Simon Coates @simonjcoates.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
The only reason I can think of as to why there are fewer than 50,000 signatures here is that people haven't seen it yet. — Jason Arday: Demand a public inquiry now — goodlawproject.org/petition/jas...
goodlawproject.org
Jason Arday: Demand a public inquiry now | Good Law Project
Commission an immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press given its contribution to Dr Arday’s tragic death.
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Matthias Eberl @eberlmat.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
I mean, what exactly did they expect after making universities financially depend on international students, and at the same time making international students feel increasingly unwelcome in the country?
theguardian.com
UK universities face ‘financial crisis’ amid collapse in international students
Higher education figures call on Labour to reverse tax on fees and warn institutions at risk of ‘going under’
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tobyontour @tobyontour.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
He got about twice as many votes as the Count. Maybe we should start calling him Nigel Two Bins simply because I imagine he’s the kind of person who’d find that really annoying.
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Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
When you don't listen for *years* to what loads of us who actually understand universities say, when you listen to a load of know-nothing frauds from think tanks and consultants and media loudmouths instead, this is the university disaster you make. Govts could have listened. They didn't.
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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I have started running Claude alongside the book I am writing on ants, as well as just letting Google Gemini do its thing at the top when I do Google search. It is not doing any writing I am using, and I am always checking the results against primary sources.
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Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Deeply irresponsible. We're in a climate crisis. This is such a terrible start. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Burnham to announce plans for new North Sea oil and gas drilling
Drilling has become a controversial topic for the Labour party after the 2024 manifesto pledged to not issue new licences.
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Zach Elsbury @zachelsbury.eurosky.social · 15/07/2026
So the one minister with Treasury experience is a no-go because he‘ll spook the markets, while a minister with no treasury experience, who hasn’t expressed a single idea on fiscal policy, and whose main contribution to the economy will be negative won’t be? Sorry, this is just ridiculous.
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Latest work from the group, led by Dipankar… pubs.rsc.org/cc/article/d...
pubs.rsc.org
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David Firn @davidfirn.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Patriotic duty in making Britain a success, you say?
Invest in Britain or I’ll force you to, minister tells pension fundsHeadlines about recent custs to science funding
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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
And that’s the mass-murdering handiwork of Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society. Who is also an inciter of racist violence. But he’s incredibly rich, so the @royalsociety.org giggles, smiles shyly, and looks the other way.
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
The world is falling apart, but at least I am getting spam emails from dead novelists who had things to say about situations like we’re in…
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Michael O’Neill @michaeloneill.org · 03/06/2026
Not being dramatic, but this probably signals the effective end of Chemistry in English Universities. An *efficient* Department loses something like £2k per Chemistry student per year; this change will roughly double that loss. Universities would be mad to keep teaching Chemistry.
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
We need someone to come and run our SAXS facility at Glasgow - brand new machine to be installed, perhaps with your help running it? If interested: www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/research...
jobs.gla.ac.uk
Research Facility Manager: Small Angle X-ray Scattering
Job PurposeThe purpose of this post is to lead the installation, set-up, and subsequent day-to-day running and management of the newly established small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) facility withi...
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Watching in real time how any chance for wildlife to exist disappears as people decide it is more important they can park immediately outside their house… at least the tree is so far ok
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DuckDuckGo @duckduckgo.com · 29/05/2026
Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising! Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images. (1/3)
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
No or fewer…? What is she doing to get to fewer than zero children??? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
At the risk of being critical, doesn’t this seem like a control that should have been done a bit earlier…
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
I am so interested to meet colleagues and essentially find out that all everyone wants to talk about is the issue with students, authors, referees etc using AI whilst also talking about how useful AI is to write grants and papers...
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Utterly the wrong call. Weak. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
UK loosens Russian oil sanctions as fuel prices rise
The waiver reflects increasing supply concerns over certain fuels due to the effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
If you are into self-assembled dipeptides but having all sorts of issues repeating the circular dichroism data that many papers report, then our latest work is for you... doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
doi.org
Investigating reproducibility challenges in CD spectroscopy of FmocFF gels
Abstract. Fluorenylmethoxycarbonyl-diphenylalanine (FmocFF) is a widely studied low molecular weight gelator known for its ability to self-assemble into su
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Phil Harrison @mrpmharrison.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Stopping this lot is, in many ways, the only UK political project that matters in the next few years. Lots of us are going to have to hold our noses at various points because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
A long shot due to the general silence here, but does anyone do vibrational circular dichroism and would like to collaborate on something? #chemsky
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Our latest work is out led by Dipankar: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a... As often, lots of help from beamline scientists @evilokapi.bsky.social and Ralf Schweins at the @illneutrons.bsky.social
pubs.rsc.org
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Just found a perfect description of gel rheology in ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’…
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Our latest work is out - if you are looking for a distraction from the doom, and are interested in gel noodles, how to actually work out how aligned the structures within them are and what you can then do with them, here's the link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Shear‐Induced Anisotropic Supramolecular Gel Noodles for Improved Cell Guidance in Polarized Tissue Engineering
A simple two-stage extrusion aligns supramolecular fibrils into 1D gel noodles. The residual pressure in the viscous pre-gel drives the formation of a thin filament that is locked by Ca2+ cross-linke...
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Reposted by Dave Adams
Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
It is so embarrassing that it has taken nearly a decade for a British minister to say this, a statement of the absolute bloody obvious
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
New Year, New Paper - work carried out by a visiting student from Italy to look at remediation of a Historic Scotland hill fort - really interesting new problems to tackle... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Assessment and characterization of Origanum vulgare essential oil in highly viscous polymeric dispersions for cleaning cultural heritage stone materials
Stone biodeterioration caused by microbial colonisation poses significant challenges to the conservation of cultural heritage. Here, we investigate hi…
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Glasgow, cold but pretty…
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RSC MASC @rsc-masc.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Congrats to Dr Simona Bianco (University of Glasgow) and Dr Jiarong Wu @jiarongwu.bsky.social (University of St Andrews/Universität Würzburg) who were awarded the 2025 RSC MASC Group PhD Thesis Award trophy 🏆 given in memory of John Fossey! #MASC2025 #RSC_MASC
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Well, this is the first time I have seen an emoji in a reference letter... my grumpy old man status means this is not a positive aspect of the letter even though it has a big smile...
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Very proud of Simona and all of her many achievements at @uofgchem.bsky.social - she was a fantastic PhD student!
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
Interesting we don't seem to get a say in whether our proposals will be used to train the AI and release the confidential ideas into the AI world...
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
I need suggestions for a journal that will publish some careful work we have that shows how difficult it is to collect specific data carefully and how to it properly. It accidentally shows key papers in the field are likely wrong. Currently getting referees telling us there is no **impact**…
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
Another paper out - this one is working with Arthi Jayaraman at the University of Delaware to use their machine learning approaches to understand our small angle scattering - written as a tutorial review so hopefully useful for people to follow: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
pubs.acs.org
Tutorial: Machine-Learning-Based CREASE-2D Analysis of 2D SAXS Profiles to Characterize Anisotropic Nanostructures in Soft Materials
We present a tutorial to guide users on how to extend the Computational Reverse Engineering Analysis of Scattering Experiments-2D (CREASE-2D) framework to interpret their experimental two-dimensional ...
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
Latest work from the group looking at using our functionalised dipeptides for energy storage via a micellar analogue to MOST... www.nature.com/articles/s42...
nature.com
Functionalized azobenzenes for micellar solar thermal energy storage as a next-generation MOST system - Communications Chemistry
Molecular solar thermal energy storage (MOST) systems employ photoswitchable molecules that absorb sunlight and store energy through reversible isomerization, cyclization or other intramolecular rearr...
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Seeing all the aurora photos on here, I will join with the latest masterpiece from my 4 year old of her thumb which fits the colour palette…
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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...
vox.com
DNA scientist James Watson has a remarkably long history of sexist, racist public comments
“People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty,” he said in 2003. “I think it would be great.”
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Why oh why are universities (for example) still using twitter?
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The Struggling Scientists @thestrugglings4.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
A few key things that apply no matter where you are: ⭐ Meeting with your supervisor at least once a week strongly correlates with higher satisfaction ⭐ Students early in their PhD tend to be happier than those nearing the end ⭐ Working more than 60 hours a week makes satisfaction plummet
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Leverhulme Trust @leverhulme.ac.uk · 21/10/2025
@profdraper.bsky.social @unistrathclyde.bsky.social @uofglasgow.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @uniofnottingham.bsky.social
Black background with gold swirls. 
Chemistry
Dr Rebecca Beveridge, University of Strathclyde 
Professor Emily Draper, University of Glasgow 
Professor Alexander Forse, University of Cambridge 
Professor Meera Mehta, University of Oxford 
Dr Mattia Silvi, University of Nottingham
Leverhulme Trust logo and URL leverhulme.ac.uk/news/2025PLP.
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Emily Draper @profdraper.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
Delighted to have been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize from @leverhulme.ac.uk thank you for the recognition and support from the Trust throughout my career, and to my collaborators, colleagues and all the researchers who worked in the group ❤️
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
As always, it’s such a shame to see chemistry Nobel prize winners posing in the lab without appropriate PPE… #failedrolemodels
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
This is great. It naturally follows that Musk can only get out of our politics if politicians and political journalists stop using the social media site he controls.
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Prof Nisreen Alwan @nisreenalwan.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
This does not look like “impartiality”. It looks like propaganda. www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/how...
thelondoneconomic.com
Reform, with 0.7% of all MPs, featured in 25% of BBC's recent 10pm news bulletins
Astonishingly, a party with 18 times as many MPs as Reform has received one-third less coverage on BBC News at 10.
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
Latest work from the group, led by Yanyao, a visiting student from China, with a lot of collaborators... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Self‐Assembly of Off‐Target Peptide Sequences: Implications for the Design of Soft Materials
For an ionic complementary peptide, both a truncated peptide and an epimerized peptide can still form gels. Mixing these peptides with the parent FEFEFKFK leads to the formation of new, but different...
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
It's clear people are using ChatGPT for everything and one dead giveaway is a million em-dashes in the text. Can anyone tell me why ChatGPT loves an em-dash?
media.tenor.com
a close up of a man 's face with the words `` eye roll '' behind him .
ALT: a close up of a man 's face with the words `` eye roll '' behind him .
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Dave Adams @profdjadams.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
I should be able to charge my coffees to my research grants considering this is essentially the main way of getting papers written...
media.tenor.com
a man sits at a table with a laptop and a bottle of beer on it
ALT: a man sits at a table with a laptop and a bottle of beer on it
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