Professor Chick Wilson, recently appointed to the Chair in Physical Chemistry at the University of Bath, is giving his inaugural lecture on 6 April 2011.
Professor Wilson’s research focuses on the area of Crystal Engineering – trying to design sets of molecules that when put together will produce a solid-state architecture that can be predicted and, more importantly, whose properties can be controlled.
Professor Wilson explains Crystal Engineering: “Structural chemists make molecules in a different way to normal chemists, Instead of joining atoms together by making or breaking covalent bonds, they join whole molecules together by making or breaking other types of bonds.
“These so-called intermolecular bonds, of which the hydrogen bond is the most well-known and widespread, are in some ways easier to work with, since they will usually assemble in simple experiments to produce useful solid-state materials.
“However, they do cause problems – they are less easy to predict and control than normal chemical bonds, and a whole science called “Crystal Engineering” has grown up to try to find ways of doing just that.”
Professor Wilson tries to find out how we can put molecules together most effectively, with the target of both understanding more about these interactions, and for designing materials with potential applications in optics, electronics and pharmaceuticals.
In his inaugural lecture, Professor Wilson will try to explain how he chooses the molecules to put together, how they are assembled and studied. He will also look at how the use of advanced experimental and computational techniques in structural chemistry can allow us to watch the evolution of these molecules as their structure and properties change with different composition and external conditions.
These molecules are usually assembled into the solid-state using the technique of crystallisation, and Professor Wilson will discuss how to try to control the way in which the molecules assemble through advanced crystallisation techniques, and why this can be beneficial both in discovering new materials and in optimising the production of previously known and useful systems.
Before taking the Chair at Bath, Professor Wilson returned to his home city in 2003 as Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, after almost 20 years at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford perfecting his understanding of structural chemistry.
He and his research group are currently involved in a range of research projects and several UK-wide networks looking into structural chemistry, including two recently announced major EPSRC-funded collaborations – Dynamical Structural Science at Harwell and the Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation.
As well as their in-house preparative and structural experiments, Chick’s group also carry out regular experiments at neutron facilities throughout the world to try to obtain more detail on the interactions holding their target molecules together in the solid-state.
Free tickets for the lecture are available from: fs-admin@bath.ac.uk, telephone +44 (0) 1225 383647.