Prof Alexandra Slawin

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone

+44 (0)1334 467280

Email

amzs@st-andrews.ac.uk

Biography

Alex Slawin was born in Taunton in 1961 where she went to Bishop Fox School.  She went to Imperial College to study for her BSc and PhD.  In 1994 she moved to Loughborough University to establish a chemical crystallography lab. In 1999 she moved to St Andrews where she was promoted to Professor in 2002 ? the first female chemistry professor in St Andrews.   Her research is primarily concerned with the determination of the 3-D structures of molecules and materials and the relationship between these structures and properties.   As part of her research she has developed automation for crystallography.  Her laboratory has been one of the best equipped in the world for the past decade.  Recently she was Co-I on a successful  >£1M bid to improve structural science facilities and has upgraded her facility to include state of the art X-Ray photon counting Pilatus detector technology.

 She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2011 she was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013 she was recognized as a rare women with over 50 papers in Angewandte Chemie and in 2014 she published her 1000^th paper.  As of March 2019, With 3350 structures (and counting), Professor Alex Slawin is the most prollific female contributor to the Cambridge Crystallographic Database

Research areas

Alex Slawin's research is primarily concerned with structure determination and its application to chemistry. Highlights include significant papers on the structures of so-called 'supramolecular' systems such as catenanes and rotaxanes which illustrate the importance of 'secondary' interactions in determining conformation and macroscopic properties. I have also maintained a significant interest in inorganic structure determination including coordination polymers and main group rings and cages.

PhD supervision

• Hannah Kerr

Selected publications

• Automated chemical crystallography

  Fuller, A., Scott-Hayward, L. A. S., Li, Y., Buehl, M., Slawin, A. M. Z. & Woollins, J. D., 28 Apr 2010, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 132, 16, p. 5799-5802 4 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article

• Metal-Organic Frameworks from Edible Natural Products

  Smaldone, R. A., Forgan, R. S., Furukawa, H., Gassensmith, J. J., Slawin, A. M. Z., Yaghi, O. M. & Stoddart, J. F., 8 Nov 2010, In : Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 49, 46, p. 8630-8634 5 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article

• Highly stable tetrathiafulvalene radical dimers in [3]catenanes

  Spruell, J. M., Coskun, A., Friedman, D. C., Forgan, R. S., Sarjeant, A. A., Trabolsi, A., Fahrenbach, A. C., Barin, G., Paxton, W. F., Dey, S. K., Olson, M. A., Benitez, D., Tkatchouk, E., Colvin, M. T., Carmielli, R., Caldwell, S. T., Rosair, G. M., Hewage, S. G., Duclairoir, F., Seymour, J. L., Slawin, A. M. Z., Goddard, W. A., Wasielewski, M. R., Cooke, G. & Stoddart, J. F., Oct 2010, In : Nature Chemistry. 2, 10, p. 870-879 10 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article

• A single crystal study of CPO-27 and UTSA-74 for nitric oxide storage and release

  Henkelis, S. E., Vornholt, S. M., Cordes, D. B., Slawin, A. M. Z., Wheatley, P. S. & Morris, R. E., 28 Mar 2019, In : CrystEngComm. 21, 12, p. 1857-1861

  Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article

• Chiral Au^I- and Au^III-isothiourea complexes: synthesis, characterization and application

  Gasperini, D., Greenhalgh, M., Imad, R., Siddiqui, S., Malik, A., Arshad, F., Choudhary, M. I., Al-Majid, A., Cordes, D., Slawin, A., Nolan, S. & Smith, A. D., 21 Dec 2018, In : Chemistry - A European Journal. Early View

  Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article

• Novel binaphthyl and biphenyl ?- and ?-amino acids and esters: organocatalysis of asymmetric Diels-Alder reactions. A combined synthetic and computational study

  Bulman Page, P. C., Kinsey, F. S., Chan, Y., Strutt, I. R., Slawin, A. M. Z. & Jones, G. A., 28 Oct 2018, In : Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry. 16, 40, p. 7400-7416 17 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article

• New mechanism for the nucleation and growth of large zeolite X crystals in the presence of triethanolamine

  Turner, S., Chen, J., Slawin, A. M. Z. & Zhou, W., 18 Jan 2019, In : Chemical Communications. 55, 6, p. 862-865

  Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article

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