A Diamond–Leeds Partner PhD Studentship
Pioneering Techniques
Are you interested in working in a large collaborative team towards advancing the understanding of how molecules interact during the crystallisation process?
Are you interested in pioneering the use of new operando characterisation techniques based on X-ray diffraction/scattering and Raman scattering?
How organic molecules behave in solution and how they form crystals has a great impact on their production, processability and stability. This project focuses on a known functional material that forms squaric acid with coformers to produce materials with properties such as thermochromism and electrochromism with the aim of working towards advancing the understanding of its crystallisation in solution. With a particular focus on the material’s intermolecular interaction in the solution state, this project hopes to better understand the role of crystallisation on the properties of the functional material formed.
Time Division
You will spend approximately 50% of your time at the University of Leeds and 50% across crystallography beamlines I11 (high resolution powder X-ray diffraction) and I15-1 (X-ray Pair Distribution Function – XPDF) at Diamond Light Source Ltd, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, located on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
Expert Research Support
You will have the opportunity to interact with a multidisciplinary team, and your research will be advised by Dr Anuradha Pallipurath and Prof Sven LM Schroeder at the University of Leeds and by Dr Lucy Saunders and Dr Daniel Irving at the I11 and I15-1 beamlines at Diamond Light Source, respectively. The outcomes of your research will serve a wide community of researchers working in pharmaceuticals.
Full Project Details
Particle engineering is a key area driving forward materials research. Be it the crystallisation of materials from solution or their interaction as solid-state particles, the field is dominated by inter-molecular interactions. These interactions govern not only the functional form of the final product but also the processing conditions. Hence, it is vital to understand the intermolecular interactions that dominate the crystallisation process. With advances in X-ray sources and detector technology as well as computing power, it is now possible to follow crystallisation from solution and arrive at an experimentally validated solution-structure model to enable us to identify key intermolecular interactions and thus control them.
The studentship will entail developing methods using XPDF analysis and polarised Raman spectroscopy (PRS) to identify these intermolecular interactions on model systems and apply them to in-situ manufacturing conditions. Correlations in intermolecular interactions arising from molecular conformations (as observed by PRS) with local structures (as observed by XPDF) will aid improvements in the predictive design of functional materials and, therefore, their manufacturing. There will also be an opportunity to carry out electron diffraction and X-ray spectroscopic analysis on these systems.
Attributes of Suitable Applicants
(1) An aptitude for computational modelling
(2) Exposure to crystallisation techniques
(3) Knowledge of basic crystallography
This project is jointly funded for three and a half years by the School of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Leeds and Diamond Light Source Ltd. Successful students will receive a stipend of no less than the standard UKRI stipend rate, currently set at £18,622 for the academic year 2023 to 2024 (the rates for subsequent academic years have not been published), plus a £2,000 per annum stipend top-up.
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
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