Last week, we received Dr Darren Budd, BASF Europe's commercial chemistry manager. One thing I picked out of Darren's excellent talk to our students was diversity within the chemical industry and news last week that the chemical giant Ineos is moving into the car industry after it's Mancunian founder Jim Ratcliffe announced it spied a gap in the 4x4 car industry by moving Ineos into creating the Land Rover Defender's successor is positive news for the British economy. In this post-Brexit 'doom and gloom' BBC inspired atmosphere, I did not spot this too much on news outets last week. Positive news sometimes is hard to find!

Last week on our L6 Science and Industry module we received a guest speaker from BASF Chemicals Ltd, Michael Boswell (EHS Process and Safety Uk and Ireland) who gave our students an insight into corporate responsibility in the chemical industry. An example used as still the biggest corporate 'pay-out' was the 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexicio from the Deepwatwer Horizon spill. Last week BP posted profits of £2.28bn - less than half of the 2015 figure of £4.7bn and it seems still that the company is adding to the £50bn bill faced so-far for the spill. It seems so much like a text-book lesson for all energy enterprises as to why you can't cut corners. Yes, the business is facing other factors with it's downgrading of profits, but one thing is true in all of this: human lives matter.

Today, myself and chemistry colleagues have started to work on the pages of Salford's new chemistry programme which will be hosted at www.salford.ac.uk/chemistry and www.hub.salford.ac.uk/chemistry

Today too marks the start of trying to put together the 4th Hans Suschitzky Symposium here at Salford in April 2017. Anyone wanting to sponsor the event, hey, get in-touch!

It's official then. After many years of trying, we at Salford will return a full chemistry degree back here for September 2017. Wonderful, wonderful news!