Miss Bianca Leigh Davids

Bianca graduated from the University of Johannesburg (UJ), South Africa, in 2015 with a BSc degree specializing in chemistry and geology. During this time, she worked under the supervision of Dr Mulisa Nemanashi and Prof Reinout Meijboom as part of the University’s Undergraduate Research Academy. She went on to further obtain her masters degree in Chemistry under the supervision of Dr Banothile Makhubela and Dr Edwin Mmutlane, whereby her research focused on the development of new water-soluble catalysts for the aqueous biphasic hydroformylation process. This work also involved a computational aspect that resulted in a short project carried out at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana under the supervision of Dr Richard Tia. In 2019, she took on a doctoral project under the supervision of Prof Charles de Koning and Dr Kennedy Ngwira at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa focusing on the development of novel chiral pyranonapthaquinone antibiotics from compounds derived from cashew nutshell liquid (CNSL), with focus on biocatalysis to introduce desired stereochemistry as a green alternative to traditional chiral catalysts. Bianca has been an active member of IYCN since 2017, and has served on both the Social Media steering committee (2017-2019), as well as the Governance steering committee (2020-present).