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Welcome to the Durham Supramolecular Chemistry Group page. This page gives an informal and topical look at the research work going in the Supramolecular Chemistry group at Durham headed by Professor Jonathan Steed. For a general description of the group’s research interests click research. Prospective M.Chem. and Ph.D. Students should consult the Projects and Funding page. Information about our books on supramolecular chemistry and nanochemistry, publications, group members and group leader Jonathan Steed is available via the links above. Opportunities for Postdoctoral research in the group depend on the availability of funding and vacant positions are advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Unfortunately we cannot respond to unsolicited applications unless applicants are seeking support for their own Fellowship funding.

The group is part of the Polymorphism @ Durham Research grouping.

Group News

• July 2024 – Prof. Steed’s article “Supramolecular gel chemistry: developments over the last decade” https://doi.org/10.1039/c0cc03293j has been featured in an online collection highlighting 60 pioneering historic papers from the United Kingdom. You can read the collection here.
• February 2024 – A fully funded PhD position is available in the group in collaboration with The Falcon Project, entitled “Spin-crossover-activation-in-energetic-metal-organic-frameworks”. See the advert on FindAPhD.com
• September 2023 – One of our very best papers on fascinating gel morphology has been published in Chemical Science. One molecule; many flavours! Great work by an amazing team over many years especially James Smith and Rafa Contreras-Montoya.

• February 2022 – The 3rd Edition of Supramolecular Chemistry has now been published! At 1219 pages and in full colour the book has been radically revised to account for the latest developments in the field, with tremendous input from the Twitter Community #SupramolChem3rdEd. Get your copy here now.

• June 2021 – Jon Steed has been awarded the RSC Tilden Prize for his work in the understanding, control and application of the assembly of molecular materials in the crystal and gel state.
• September 2020 – In collaboration with Graeme Day (Southampton) and Mike Probert (Newcastle) our paper on Minimizing Polymorphic Risk through Cooperative Computational and Experimental Exploration has been published in J. Am. Chem. Soc.

• July 2020 – Our work in collaboration with Mike Probert and Mike Hall in Newcastle along with work by Jim Wuest in Montreal has resulted in the 13th and 14th structures of the highly polymorphic ROY (now once again the most polymorphic small molecule. The work out the two groups is featured in Chem. Eng. News.
• January 2020 – The group in collaboration with Prof. Patrick Steel and a large coalition of international partners has been awarded funding by the EPSRC through the GCRF Scheme for a project involving treatment of one of the worlds nastiest neglected tropical diseases. “Patient-centric supramolecular formulations of new anti-leishmanial drugs for Indian Communities”. Total £906,253.
• January 2020 – Jonathan Steed has been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of the ACS journal Crystal Growth & Design. See Jon’s inaugural interview here.

• May 2019 – The group has been awarded funding by the EPSRC for a project involving fibre scrolling, braiding and topology. “Scrolling, Braiding and Branching in Fibrous Soft Materials“. Total £408,332.
• March 2019 – Our work on fibre braiding in urea chains has been published in Nature Chemistry and featured in New Scientist (with a lovely picture of a pot of wee)!

• April 2018 – Group Graduate Dr. Yuexian Hong has been awarded a prestigious ‘International Talent Fellowship’ by the Chinese Government to work at Peking University. Well done Yuexian!
• December 2017 – The group has been awarded funding by the EPSRC for a collaborative project with Prof. Graeme Day (Southampton), Circe Crystal Engineering and AstraZeneca. EPSRC EP/R013373/1 “A Supramolecular Gel Phase Crystallisation Strategy” Total £647,452. Please see jobs.ac.uk for a newly advertised PDRA position.
• July 2017 – PhD work by Yuexian Hong on environmentally friendly dishwasher additives is the subject of a UK patent application filed with P&G. Well done Yuexian!
• July 2017 – PhD work by Melissa Goodwin on coamorphus drug phases and on the well-known antiseptic povidone iodine (in collaboration with Ben Steed) is the subject of two US patent applications filed with Ashland Inc. Many congratulations Melissa and Ben!
• June 2017 – Chris Jones has won the Ken Wade Thesis Prize for the best PhD Thesis in Durham Chemistry this year. Many congratulations Chris!
• June 2015 – Dr. Stuart Kennedy has won first Poster Prize at the 48th Erice Crystallography Course – Engineering crystallography: from molecule to crystal to functional form. Congratulations Stuart!
• March 2015 – A comprehensive review of the high Z’ phenomenon has been published entitled Packing Problems: High Z’ Crystal Structures and Their Relationship to Cocrystals, Inclusion Compounds, and Polymorphism, Chem. Rev., 2015, asap article DOI: 10.1021/cr500564z.
• October 2014 – Two new researchers, Kate Horner and Antonio Cincotti, have started in the group working as part of a £1.7M Leverhulme Trust funded Research Programme Grant on the Scientific Properties of Complex Knots (SPOCK). The project is a collaboration across 12 researchers at Durham and Bristol Universities encompassing Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Bioscience, Computer Science, Anthropology and Philosophy.
• September 2014 – The Z‘ web resource has a new home at zprime.co.uk and has been fully updated though to the May 2014 CSD update. The literature section has also been significantly updated and expanded.

• April 2014 – Work led by PhD student Jonathan Foster (now a postdoc in Cambridge) on using gel morphology to control pore shape has been featured on the front cover of New Journal of Chemistry.

• January 2013 – For the year ended 2012, annual citations to work by the Steed group has topped 1000 for the first time giving the group a total of 7500 citations to our primary research.

• January 2013 – Our review on the role of co-crystals in pharmaceutical design has been featured on the front cover of Trends in Pharmacological Sciences.

• January 2013 – Our work on Halogen-bond-triggered gelation in collaboration with Pierangelo Metrangelo and Giuseppe Resnati (Milan) has been published in Nature Chemistry and is featured on the front cover.

• December 2012 – Two New EU Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellows, Dr. Prakash Reddy and Dr. Arnab Dawn, will be joining the group in 2013. Their project will involve single-crystal-to-single-crystal transitions and pharamceutical crystal growth in supramolecular gels. Congratulations to both of them for winning these prestigious awards!
• October 2012 – A web database and resource www.hydrateweb.org dedicated to the crystal chemistry or organic hydrates, funded by the EPSRC KTA is now live.

• September 2012 – Jonathan Steed was the opening speaker at Indaba-7 in Kruger National Park, South Africa.
• March 2012 – We have attracted EPSRC funding of £680k for a project entitled “Complementary Gel and Microemulsion Strategies for Pharmaceutical Crystallisation”. The grant is a collaboration with Sharon Cooper, Judith Howard and Paul Hodgkinson as part of the Polymorphism@Durham grouping and will explore kinetic templating of drug crystal forms in gels as well as targetting the thermodynamic polymorph in microemulsions.
• March 2012 – Hiromitsu Maeda (Ritsumeikan University, Japan) has won the ChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship 2012. The award was presented by Jonathan Steed at ICPOC 2012, Durham, 12/9/12.
• January 2012 – An 8-volume major reference work “Supramolecular Chemistry from Molecules to Nanomaterials” Edited by Philip Gale and Jonathan Steed with the assistance of a stellar group of international section editors and advisory board, has just been published by Wiley.
• December 2011 – Prakash Reddy has been awarded an EU Marie Curie IIF Fellowship to carry out a project entitled “Solid State Chameleons: Chemical Transformations as Single Crystal Transitions” within the group.
• December 2011 – Our article “Supramolecular Gel Chemistry: Developments over the last Decade” Chem. Commun. 2011, 47, 1379-1383 is one of the top 5 most accessed Highlights in 2011 and was the journal’s most accessed article for October.
• July 2011 – Ph.D. student Jonathan Foster won a poster prize at the 6th International Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry, Brighton for his work on pharmaceutical crystallisation in supramolecular gels. Jona also gave an outstanding oral ‘flash presentation’
• July 2011 – our paper The Structure of Water in p-Sulfonatocalix[4]arene (Chem. Eur. J.) has been highlighted as a ‘Very Important Paper‘. This paper reports the gorgeous single crystal neutron structures of known and new forms of the hydrated calixarenes discovered by the Atwood group (Nature 1991). Some surprises and calculations on the OH…pi interaction using PACHA.

• March 2011 – Jonathan Steed lectured at the Cátedra de Sede at the UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA. 

• February 2011 – our paper Rheology and Silver Nanoparticle Templating in a Bis(urea) Silver Metallogel” (Soft Matter, DOI: 10.1039/C0SM00647E) has been highlighted as a ‘hot article’.
• December 2010 – our paper “Supramolecular Gel Chemistry: Developments Over the Last Decade” (Chem. Commun. 2010, 47, 1379-1383) is the most accessed paper for October 2010.
• May 2010 – “Chemistry in its Element podcast”. Jonathan Steed, has published a Podcast on the element Niobium as part of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry in its Element podcast series. The series, fronted by the well-known broadcaster Johnny Ball, is an accessible, often quirky, look at some of the more interesting features, history and impact of the chemical elements. Download at http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/podcast/element.asp.
• April 2010 – Jonathan Steed has been awarded one of the 2010 RSC Corday-Morgan Prizes “for his outstanding contributions in the fields of supramolecular and structural chemistry”.
• April 2010 – Ph.D. student Jonathan Foster won 2nd prize in the Industrial Talk Category at the British Crystallographic Spring Meeting for his work on pharmaceutical crystallisation in supramolecular gels.
• March 2010 – The American Library Association’s review journal “Choice” has selected “Supramolecular Chemistry 2nd Edition” in its annual list of Outstanding Academic Titles. Every year Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. The list contains less than 3% of the 25,000 titles submitted for review. Choice editors base their selections on the reviewer’s evaluation of the work, the editor’s knowledge of the field, and the reviewer’s record.
• March 2010 – Two papers, both reporting the work of Ph.D. student Adam Swinburne in the group “A Quinolinium-Derived Turn-off Fluorescent Anion Sensor“, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2010, 8, 1010-1016 and “Fluorescent ‘Twist-on’ Sensing by Induced-Fit Anion Stabilisation of a Planar Chromophore” Chem. Eur. J., 2010, 16, 2714-2718 are both listed as most accessed articles for Feb. ’10 by Org. Biomol. Chem. and Chem. Eur. J., respectively.
• March 2010 – “New Chem. Comm. Associate Editor”. Jonathan Steed has been named as the new UK Associate Editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry flagship journal Chemical Communications. Chemical Communications has an ISI impact factor of 5.34 making it one of the highest cited primary journals in the discipline. Professor Steed will be accepting manuscripts to the Durham office from mid March 2010 and particular welcomes submissions in the area of supramolecular chemistry, crystal engineering and soft materials chemistry.
• August 2009 – “Smart Supramolecular Gels”. In an article published in this month’s Nature Chemistry, Jonathan Steed and Gareth Lloyd highlight the emerging science of ion-tunable gels; jelly-like materials with switchable flow properties that have interesting potential application is drug formulation and delivery. The overview is based on the Steed group’s earlier work published in the journal Chemical Communications last year.
• August 2009 – “Chemistry in its Element podcast”. Jonathan Steed, is the latest in a long series of experts to immortalise one of the chemical elements in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry in its Element podcast series. The series, fronted by the well-known broadcaster Johnny Ball, is an accessible, often quirky, look at some of the more interesting features, history and impact of the chemical elements. Steed’s take on the element ruthenium – an element reserved for the connoisseur – can be downloaded at http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/podcast/element.asp.
• January 2009 – The second edition of Supramolecular Chemistry by Jonathan Steed and Jerry Atwood is now published.
• December 2008 – our paper A ‘compartmental’ Borromean weave coordination polymer exhibiting saturated hydrogen bonding to anions and water cluster inclusion” (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2008, 47, 5761) is a Sceptical Chymist ‘Top 10’ pick for 2008.
• November 2008 – Jonathan Steed is the winner of the 2008 Bob Hay Lectureship. The award lecture was given at Supra-Nano ’08 on 16th December in Birmingham.
• September 2008 – Our paper “Anion Hydrogen Bond Effects in the Formation of Planar or Quintuple Helical Coordination Polymers“, Chem. Commun., 2008, 3720-3722 is listed as a top 10 most accessed article for Aug ’08 by Chem. Commun.
• August 2008 – Our paper “Should solid-state molecular packing have to obey the rules of crystallographic symmetry?” is listed as an all time top 10 cited article by CrystEngComm.
• July 2008 – our paper A ‘compartmental’ Borromean weave coordination polymer exhibiting saturated hydrogen bonding to anions and water cluster inclusion” (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2008, 47, 5761) is highlighted by Nature Chemistry
• May 2008 – Our work is featured on the cover of the Jerry Atwood 65th Brithday Special Issue of New Journal of Chemistry.
• March 2008 – a Major EPSRC grant “Is water structure Important?” has been awarded.
• March 2008 – “A conformationally flexible, urea-based tripodal anion receptor: Solid-state, solution and theoretical studies“, J. Org. Chem., 2006, 71, 1598-1608 is listed as an ACS “Most-Cited Article” for the second year running.
• Feb 2008 – Edited work Organic Nanostructures (Wiley-VCH) is published.
• Jan 2008 – Kirsty Anderson is the recipient of the 2008 CCDC Young Crystallographer Prize
• Oct 2007 – Jon Steed has been promoted to a personal chair.
• April 2007 – Textbook “Core Concepts in Supramolecular Chemistry and Nanochemistry” is published.
• Dec 2006 – a Major EPSRC grant “Symmetry Breaking in Molecular Crystal Structures” has been awarded.
• July 2006 – a Major EPSRC grant “Chemically Tunable Supramolecular Gels” has been awarded.
• March 2006 – Jonathan Steed is the recipient of the 2006 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision
• February 2006 – Feature Article “A Modular Approach to Anion Binding Podands: Adaptibility in Design and Synthesis Leads to Adaptability in Properties“, Chem. Commun. 2006, 2637  is among the top 10 accessed for June 2006.
• Durham to Lead Leverhulme Trust Funded International Exchange Initiative on Hydrogen Activation and Storage
• February 2006 – One of our Crystal Engineering papers has been highlighted in Chemical Science by the RSC. This paper forms part of a growing body of EPSRC sponsored work on crystal structures with high Z’ values. For a thorough introduction see our review in CrystEngComm 2003, 5, 169.
• July 2004 – Our work on ion-pair binding was featured on the Chem. Comm. cover and was among the month’s top 10 most accessed papers: “A Modular, Self-Assembled, Separated Ion-Pair Binding System,” Chem. Commun., 2004, 1352-1353.

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