X-Ray Crystallography and the Crystallographers Behind the Structures |
Over the years I have had the pleasure of working with a number of amazing X-ray crystallographers who collected and refined some truly unique structures. I am very grateful for their scientific contributions to my research.
During my time at the University of Alberta, Dr. Robert McDonald and Dr. Michael Ferguson collected and refined X-ray crystallographic data for over 65 structures including many based on large aromatic chromophores, such as pentacene and anthradithiophene, and their oligomers. These data allowed us to gain key insight into how to control and design solid-state packing of these chromophores and elucidate important structure-property relationships. When the Tykwinski group relocated to Germany in 2009, crystallographer Dr. Frank Hampel joined our team and made valuable contributions to our work on isomerically pure anthradithiophenes.
While at Harvard University I had the pleasure of working with a very enthusiastic crystallographer, Dr. Shao-Liang Zheng, who refined over 40 structures associated with my various projects including some extremely large supramolecular organizations containing over 500 atoms per unit cell. These studies significantly contributed to our understanding of a variety of organocatalytic transformations and helped guide our efforts related to catalyst design. I am also grateful to him for the countless afternoons he spent teaching me about various aspects of crystallography and discussing cutting-edge literature related to crystallography.
Recently, I started collaborating with crystallographer Dr. Emil Lobkovsky at Cornell University who's proficiency and dedication to his work motivates me to crystallize molecules of ever growing complexity. I cannot wait to publish the beautiful structures we have already obtained and I am sure the exciting road ahead will bring many more eye-catching structures!
Thanks to the contributions of these crystallographers, they have enabled me to pursue my interests in molecular design, crystal engineering, and crystallography. I am also grateful to the people and funding agencies who have financially sponsored these efforts aimed at understanding how molecular structure controls solid-state geometries and their associated packing as a result of non-covalent interactions.