Alexandra Martha Zoya Slawin | |
---|---|
Born | 1961 (age 61–62) |
Alma mater | Loughborough University Imperial College London |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of St Andrews |
Thesis | The X-ray crystal structures of organic and inorganic systems (1997) |
Alexandra Martha Zoya Slawin (born 1961) is a British chemist and Professor at the University of St Andrews. Her research looks to understand the structure of supramolecular systems (e.g. rotaxanes and catenanes). She is generally considered as one of the world's leading crystallographers. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011.
Slawin studied chemistry at Imperial College London. [1] [2] After earning her bachelor's degree she worked at Imperial as an Experimental Officer on X-ray crystallography. She moved to the Loughborough University, where she completed a PhD on the crystal structures of organic and inorganic systems. [3] She demonstrated how useful single cyrstal X-ray measurements were to better understand the structures of organic and inorganic solid-state systems. [3] Toward the end of her thesis she started to focus on supramolecular chemistry, particularly macrocycles, rotaxanes and catenanes. [3]
Slawin joined the University of St Andrews in 1999. [4] She was made a professor in 2004, and serves as Director of the Molecular Structure Lab. Her lab have sophisticated fully automated instrumentation for X-Ray Diffractio, including two rotating anodes and sensitive detectors. [5] She called the system the Standard (St Andrews Automated Robotic Diffractometer), which she commercialised with Rigaku. [6]
Slawin is one of the most frequent contributors to the Cambridge Crystallographic Database, having submitted over 3,500 entries. [7] Slawin was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011. The Royal Society of Chemistry named her one of their Golden Authors in 2021. [8]
A polycatenane is a chemical substance that, like polymers, is chemically constituted by a large number of units. These units are made up of concatenated rings into a chain-like structure.
In macromolecular chemistry, a catenane is a mechanically interlocked molecular architecture consisting of two or more interlocked macrocycles, i.e. a molecule containing two or more intertwined rings. The interlocked rings cannot be separated without breaking the covalent bonds of the macrocycles. They are conceptually related to other mechanically interlocked molecular architectures, such as rotaxanes, molecular knots or molecular Borromean rings. Recently the terminology "mechanical bond" has been coined that describes the connection between the macrocycles of a catenane. Catenanes have been synthesised in two different ways: statistical synthesis and template-directed synthesis.
Chromium hexacarbonyl (IUPAC name: hexacarbonylchromium) is a chromium(0) organometallic compound with the formula Cr(CO)6. It is homoleptic complex, which means that all the ligands are identical. It is a white, air-stable solid with a high vapor pressure.
In chemistry, mechanically interlocked molecular architectures (MIMAs) are molecules that are connected as a consequence of their topology. This connection of molecules is analogous to keys on a keychain loop. The keys are not directly connected to the keychain loop but they cannot be separated without breaking the loop. On the molecular level, the interlocked molecules cannot be separated without the breaking of the covalent bonds that comprise the conjoined molecules; this is referred to as a mechanical bond. Examples of mechanically interlocked molecular architectures include catenanes, rotaxanes, molecular knots, and molecular Borromean rings. Work in this area was recognized with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Bernard L. Feringa, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, and J. Fraser Stoddart.
A molecular shuttle in supramolecular chemistry is a special type of molecular machine capable of shuttling molecules or ions from one location to another. This field is of relevance to nanotechnology in its quest for nanoscale electronic components and also to biology where many biochemical functions are based on molecular shuttles. Academic interest also exists for synthetic molecular shuttles, the first prototype reported in 1991 based on a rotaxane.
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Polyrotaxane is a type of mechanically interlocked molecule consisting of strings and rings, in which multiple rings are threaded onto a molecular axle and prevented from dethreading by two bulky end groups. As oligomeric or polymeric species of rotaxanes, polyrotaxanes are also capable of converting energy input to molecular movements because the ring motions can be controlled by external stimulus. Polyrotaxanes have attracted much attention for decades, because they can help build functional molecular machines with complicated molecular structure.
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