About us
We are a research group specialising in supramolecular chemistry based in the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University in Canberra. Thanks for visiting – please have a look around and email Nick if you have any questions.
Recent news
Logan Faulkner joins as a PhD student. Like a lot of good supramolecular chemists, Logan was trained at the University of Otago, where he conducted a MSc in James Crowley’s group.
We were invited to write a News and Views piece on Deplazes, Wu and co-workers’ lovely Nature Chemistry paper on sulfate encapsulation in a neutral cage. You can read the original paper here, and our summary here.
A productive start to the year: Petch’s collaboration with the Macreadie group on water-adsorbing hydrogen bonded frameworks containing cubane and bicyclopentane is published in Chem. Commun., Zeke and Jordan’s paper on a new class of belt-substituted pillararenes is published in J. Org. Chem., and Rosie’s paper on simple cationic catechols that bind anions really strongly (when they’re not decomposing to funky boron-containing zwitterions) is published in Chem. Asian J.
On his mini-sabbatical, Nick spent some time with the head of Oxford’s crystallography service, Dr Amber Thompson, writing a tutorial review on how best to deal with hydrogen atoms in crystal structures of supramolecular structures. This is now published in Chem. Soc. Rev.
Three new students join the group for the start of second semester. Meabh starts an undergraduate research project on hydrogen bonded frameworks, Callum starts a MChem project on halogen bonded frameworks (on exchange from the University of Edinburgh), and Rory starts an Honours project on hydrazone cages. Welcome!
Oscar and Jordan’s paper on the synthesis of pillar[6]arenes is published in J. Org. Chem. There are lots and lots of reported ways to make pillar[6]arenes, but we found it really hard to reproduce them. This paper suggests why that might be.
Nick is off on a mini-sabbatical. He will be away from mid-May until the end of July visiting collaborator Dr Jona Foster at the University of Sheffield and attending a couple of international conferences in Switzerland and Iceland.
Petch’s paper on “charge mis-matched” hydrogen bonded frameworks that have exchangeable cations in the pores and can remove dye molecules from water is published in Chem Comm.
A pretty remarkable week: the group has three papers published:
1) a correspondence in Angewandte Chemie adding structural insight into a previous paper showing some cool water sorption from the air
2) a big full paper in Dalton Transactions describing work started by Arthur David in 2016 where we tried to form metallocatenanes using the btp group, but instead ended up forming so cool macrocycles
3) a communication in Angewandte Chemie with the Jolliffe group reporting a simple compound that can selectively precipitate sulfate from water.