OUR RESEARCH

The group's research covers multiple projects which all fall within the overall theme of Supramolecular Chemistry. More detail can be found on our Publications page.

Some particular themes of current research include:

Metal-organic cages made by self-assembly:

Through exploiting reversible metal-ligand coordination interactions, the assembly of matter can be controlled on the nanoscale, creating well-defined metal-organic cages or "nanoboxes", a few nm in size (10,000 times smaller than a human hair). This is now a well-established field, with techniques to construct cages in a variety of sizes and shapes (e.g., cubes, tetrahedra, prisms), and for a variety of different applications - many of these using the inner void or cavity of these nanoboxes to trap or bind another species of interest.

Focus areas:

Developing new strategies in supramolecular chemistry to make coordination-driven self-assembly more predictable, more diverse in structure, and more powerful in function.
Exploring the historically elusive “intermediate-sized” region of the PdnL2n family, where clean access to thermodynamic products has been a challenge. By exploiting dihedral twisting and donor-offset effects in ligand frameworks, we have demonstrated routes to rare, thermodynamically stable architectures such as Pd8L16 and Pd9L18.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2025, 147, 30296-30303.

Investigating chiral molecular cages which can express chirality in several useful ways. These include enantioselective recognition and separation as well as chiroptical and photonic applications.
Developing novel metal-organic cages for use as non-invasive imaging agents as well as for drug delivery. These cages offer well-defined internal cavities and tuneable exterior surfaces. They can be engineered to encapsulate therapeutic or diagnostic payloads, protect them in solution, and influence where/when they are released.
Constructing metal-organic cages from a variety of coordination motifs which determine the cage’s topology. These nanoboxes can be applied to tackle novel applications.

Stimuli-responsive cage transformations

Beyond building cages, we aim to control how they change using external stimuli such as temperature and light etc. For example, post-assembly modification-particularly tetrazine-alkene inverse electron-demand Diels–Alder chemistry (IEDDA) – we can introduce (and later remove) controlled flexibility to drive programmed transformations between distinct cage topologies, with tuneable kinetics and thermodynamics.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2024, 146, 28233-28241.

Interlocked molecules

Interlocked molecules are an emerging strand of our research, motivated by the idea that a mechanical bond can be used as a design element to control structure, motion, and chemical reactivity at the molecular level. These exciting structures underpin the basis of molecular machines, but we are in need of new and more efficient ways of constructing them, in addition to being able to access interlocked molecules that can be responsive to a range of stimuli.

Chem. Sci. 2022, 13, 3915-3941.