Research Summary

We design, make and study inorganic complexes and nanomaterials for a range of applications (development of catalysts and materials for use in solar energy and bio technologies, sensors for biologically and environmentally important ions and molecules and inorganic-organic hybrid nanomaterials for use in nanomedicine). We are also interested in using complexes and nanomaterials as tools to answer fundamental questions about molecular assembly and biological molecules/systems. We want to control assembly and properties of inorganic complexes and materials using self-assembly/molecular recognition principles and the combination of covalent and non-covalent chemistry. Moreover, we wish our constructs to be ‘smart’ –capable of doing useful chemistry effectively by working cooperatively and interacting specifically and predictably in a given environment. We use organic, inorganic and materials synthetic strategies, and a range of physical/analytical techniques are used to probe structure (e.g. NMR, XRD, TEM, XPS, DLS), properties and function (kinetic techniques, UV-vis and Fluorescence spectroscopy, confocal microscopy, Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assays (ELISA), Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting (FACS), electrochemical techniques etc.). In addition to this synergy between making and measuring, we collaborate with other research groups as it is becoming increasingly clear that many of scientific grand challenges will be best met in the future by interdisciplinary teams and cross-fertilisation between researchers with complementary expertise and from different disciplines.