The annual Barrer Lecture will take place on Wednesday 14 November, 4pm – 5pm in LT1. It will be delivered by Professor Andrew I. Cooper from the University of Liverpool, who will discuss ‘Designing Function in Porous Molecular Solids’
The lecture is open to all and will form part of the Barrer Centre’s inaugural symposium, taking place the same day from 1pm – 6pm.
If you would like to attend the rest of the symposium please register https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/barrer-centre-symposium-tickets-51332237103 so that we are able to anticipate catering numbers (registration is free).
Further details of the Barrer Lecture are below.
Abstract: Porous molecular crystals are an exciting alternative to porous extended frameworks such as zeolites, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and polymer networks.1 Interest in such systems dates back to the first ‘organic zeolites’,2 but only recently have these materials started to show properties of potential practical interest.3 Unlike extended frameworks, molecular crystals can be processed in solution into a variety of formats.4 They can also show unique physical properties, such as reversible on/off porosity switching5 and perfect shape selectivity for organic isomers.6 Intrinsically porous molecules, such as porous organic cages,7 also serve as platforms for wholly new classes of material, such as the first ‘porous liquids’.8
However, molecular crystals also pose problems in terms of the purposeful design of solid-state function.9 In large part, this is because the energy landscape for molecular crystals is frequently not dominated by a single intermolecular interaction, unlike bonded crystalline frameworks such as MOFs and covalent organic frameworks. Hence, molecular crystal engineering has so far failed to become the “new organic synthesis” that has been envisaged,10 even though that vision is still highly attractive when one considers the importance of crystalline organic solids, which extends well beyond the area of porous materials.
This lecture will discuss the design and synthesis of new functional organic crystals using computational approaches.11-15 We will exemplify this with recent examples where the material function, such as molecular selectivity or electronic band gap, was targeted using computation. The talk will also address a more central question: is it realistic to design new functional molecular crystals in silico by de novo prediction of both structure and function? Or are such strategies doomed to be defeated by complexity for real materials?
1. Slater, A. G.; Cooper, A. I. Science, 2015, 348, 988,
2. Barrer, R. M.; Shanson, V. H. J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Commun. 1976, 333.
3. (a) Mastalerz, M.; Oppel, I. M. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 5252; (b) L. Chen et al., Nature Mater., 2014, 13, 954; (c) M. Liu, et al., Nature Commun., 2016, 7, 12750.
4. (a) Bushell, A. F. et al., Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 1253; (b) Hasell, T. et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 588; (c) Song, Q. et al., Adv. Mater., 2016, 28, 2629; (d) Jiang, S. et al., Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2018, 57, 11228.
5. Jones, J. T. A. et al., Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 749.
6. Mitra, T., et al., Nature Chem., 2013, 5, 247.
7. Giri, N., et al., Nature, 2015, 527, 216.
8. Tozawa, T., et al., Nature Mater., 2009, 8, 973.
9. Jansen, M.; Schön, J. C. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2006, 45, 3406.
10. Desiraju, G. R. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 1995, 34, 2311.
11. Jones, J. T. A., et al., Nature 2011, 474, 367.
12. Slater, A. G. et al., Nature Chem., 2016, 9, 17.
13. Pulido, A. et al., Nature, 2017, 543, 657.
14. Greenaway, R. L., et al., Nature Commun., 2018, 9, 2849.
15. Wang, X., et al., Nature Chem., 2018, DOI:10.1038/s41557-018-0141-5
We thank EPSRC (EP/N004884/1, EP/H000925/1 & EP/K018396/1), the European Research Council (project RobOT) and the Leverhulme Trust for funding.
Bio: Andy Cooper led the bid to establish the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) via the UK Research Partnerships Infrastructure Fund and he is its first Academic Director. He is also the Director of the £10 M Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design. His main research interests are organic materials, supramolecular chemistry, and materials for energy production and molecular separation. This is underpinned by a strong technical interest in high-throughput methods and robotics. A unifying theme in his research is the close fusion of computational prediction and experiment to discover new materials with step-change properties (Nature, 2011, 474, 367; Nature, 2017, 543, 657). This has involved close collaboration with Graeme Day, Professor of Chemical Modelling at the University of Southampton.
Andy was elected to the Royal Society in 2015. He has been awarded the Macro Group Young Researchers Award (2002), the RSC Award in Environmentally Friendly Polymers (2005), the McBain Medal (2007), the Corday-Morgan Prize (2009), the Macro Group Award (2010), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the Tilden Prize (2014), and the American Chemical Society Doolittle Award (2014). He was also the 2015 MIT-Georgia Pacific Lecturer in Organic Chemistry. In both 2011 and 2014, Andy was named in a Thomson Reuters list as one of the Top 100 materials scientists of the last decade; 8 and 13 UK scientists were so listed in 2011 and 2014, respectively. He was also named in the more recent 2017 Clarivate Highly Cited list in the field of chemistry. He was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigators grant in 2012 (RobOT). In 2015, he was appointed as a Consultant Professor in Hauzhong University of Science & Technology, China. He was also appointed as an Honorary Professor at East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, in 2017.
Andy is a Nottingham graduate (1991), also obtaining his Ph.D there in 1994. After his Ph.D, he held a 1851 Fellowship and a Royal Society NATO Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and then a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. In 1999, he was appointed as a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in Liverpool. In 2007, he was the founding Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery—the forerunner of the MIF—which cemented a long-term strategic collaboration between Unilever and the University of Liverpool. He was Head of Chemistry and then the first Head of the School of Physical Sciences in the period 2007-2012, during which time he served on the University Council. In 2017, he co-founded a spin-out company, Porous Liquid Technologies, with collaborators at Queens University Belfast, based on an entirely new class of material, porous liquids, invented in the UK as part of an EPSRC-funded project (Nature, 2015, 527, 216).