Welcome
EaStCHEM, the joint Chemistry Research School of Edinburgh and
St. Andrews funded by the Scottish Funding Council for Further and
Higher Education, the Office of Science and Technology and the parent
Universities, is the premier Chemistry research school for Chemistry
in Scotland and one of the largest in the UK, with around 500 researchers.
EaStCHEM expands the proud Chemistry tradition of Edinburgh and
St Andrews.
EaStCHEM's key aim is excellence in both core and interdisciplinary
chemistry.
The vibrant research activity relies on world-class academic staff,
postgraduate research fellows, a large, well resourced graduate
school and high class research support facilities and infrastructure,
available both internally and externally. Our activities span fundamental
and applied chemical research, and we are major partners in collaboration
with other disciplines and with industrial partners.
Recent News
One of Prof Steve Nolan's research papers has entered the list of most cited papers in chemistry. Entitled "Determination of N-Heterocyclic Carbene (NHC) Steric and Electronic Parameters Using the [(NHC)Ir(CO)2Cl] System” and published in Organometallics, 2008, vol. 27, p.202. It has come in at position #14 in the 2009 Hot Chemistry list.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) belong to the list of persistent organic
pollutants (POPs) included in the Stockholm Convention. The destruction of PCBs
is often performed by incineration, which raises environmental concerns.
A catalytic system capable of efficiently promoting the hydrodehalogenation of
PCBs using isopropanol as the hydrogen source and NaOH as the base was
developed by the Cazin group, as described in this Chemical Communication article, which has been awarded "hot article" status.
Dr P.Wormald and Dr W. Nazaroz have been awarded an initial £300,000 funding for studentships. We have diverse NMR instrumentation to be installed shortly and traditional instrumentation for the analysis of polymers synthesised in our laboratory using Living Free-Radical Polymerization by Reversible Addition-Fragmentation Chain Transfer (RAFT) techniques. The laboratory is aimed at creating new materials for high energy laser matter interactions, aiding fusion energy research and low carbon emission technologies with UK and international partners and developing novel NMR techniques for polymer systems. Further areas of interest are phosphorus and fluorine containing polymer membranes. Research capabilities to be added later to complement our solid state NMR include a 20 MHz TD NMR for monitoring polymerisation reactions and diffusion mechanisms and a 43 MHz Fast Field cycling NMR.
Research demonstrating Spatial Control of Crystal Nucleation in Agarose Gel carried out by Andrew Alexander and Philip Camp has been published by the Journal of the American Chemical Society and featured in a Nature News article.
The method involves using laser light to nucleate individual crystals, and offers the possibility of localising and viewing the birth of a crystal nucleus in real time. Our approach also shows great promise for producing single crystals of materials that are notoriously difficult to crystallise by other means, such as proteins.
Spatial Control of Crystal Nucleation in Aragose Gel paper in JACS
Bo Xiao working in Russell Morris's research group, has developed a new metal organic framework material that undergoes a significant transformation on dehydration to produce a material that will only readsorb one gas, nitric oxide. The research paper has been published in the most recent edition of Nature Chemistry and the front cover of the issue highlights the material. The design of the material was enabled by the use of an organic linker ligand with both strongly coordinating and weakly coordinating functional groups, which allows chemistry to take place at the weak bonds in the material while the strong bonds ensure that the material remains intact. The work opens up possibilities for the design of ultraselective gas adsorbent materials for environmental and medical applications.
Chemistry in the East of Scotland has shot to the top of the latest
UK league table, in the most important analysis of research outputs
for seven years.
EastChem the SFC research pooling partnership in Chemistry between
St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities has scored highest in Scotland
in the latest RAE announced on 18th December 2009. The EastChem partners
submitted 75% of all world leading outputs (4*) in Scotland and 12%
of world leading outputs in all of the UK. From 32 submissions EastChem
was the largest in UK Chemistry. The research School comes 4th in the
GPA metric and first when staff volume is factored in (the power ranking),
sitting above Oxford and Cambridge.
Quality GPA x staff numbers ranking
- EastChem
- University of Oxford
- University of Cambridge
- University of Bristol
(Out of 32)
Quality GPA
- University of Cambridge
- University of Nottingham
- University of Oxford
- EastChem
(Out of 32)
This is an outstanding performance and demonstrates world class breadth and depth in the chemical sciences in the East of Scotland. The spectacular rise in research quality as judged by peer review, is a result of a sustained commitment by the respective Universities and the Scottish Funding Council in supporting excellence in chemistry over the last five years. It also reflects the dedication and commitment of many academics, support staff and their students in suceeding in ground breaking research over a wide range of challenging programmes.
Simon Desset, a PhD student working with David
Cole-Hamilton has come up with an innovative idea for separating
the reaction products from the catalyst in homogeneous reactions.
By tagging coordinated phosphine ligands with weakly basic amidine
groups, to give organic soluble catalysts, he can carry out reactions
such as the conversion of alkenes to aldehydes (hydroformylation)
rapidly in a solvent such as toluene. Addition of water and bubbling
CO2 causes the catalyst, but not the product, to switch
into the aqueous phase as the protonated bicarbonate salt. After
phase separation and addition of new organic phase, the catalyst
can be switched back into the organic phase for use in a repeat
reaction by bubbling nitrogen at 60°C. Rhodium losses are
minimal (< 1 ppm).
Full details can be found in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., where
the paper has been designated a "Hot Article"
EaStCHEM has four main research areas; The Chemistry/Biology Interface,
Experimental and Theoretical Chemical Physics, Molecular Synthetic
Chemistry and Materials Chemistry. These areas underpin major initiatives
in Chemistry for Health, In Silico Scotland, Innovative Synthesis
and New Materials.
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