Course summary

Our EaStCHEM Joint Research School was formed by the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews in 2004 to combine the research activities of two of Scotland’s leading schools of chemistry. EaStCHEM now provides the largest chemistry research unit in the UK. In the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021), EaStCHEM was one of only three chemistry units to achieve a 100% “world-leading” score for our research environment. This result rewards our: provision of state-of-the-art facilities recruitment of high-quality academic, research and professional services staff collaboration across disciplines and with industry partners support for career development nurturing of talent REF 2021 also assessed >99% of our research outputs as either “world-leading” or “internationally excellent” and 100% of the economic, social and environmental benefit in our impact case studies to be “outstanding” or “very considerable”. In addition to gaining research skills, making friends, meeting eminent researchers and being part of the research community, a research degree will help you to develop invaluable transferable skills which you can apply to academic life or a variety of professions outside of academia. The Chemistry/Biology Interface This is a broad area, with particular strengths in the areas of:

• protein structure and function

• mechanistic enzymology

• proteomics

• peptide and protein synthesis

• protein folding

• recombinant and synthetic DNA methodology

• biologically targeted synthesis

• the application of high throughput and combinatorial approaches

• probing molecular structure in the gas phase, clusters and nanoparticles

• the development and application of physicochemical techniques such as mass spectoscropy to molecular systems

• the EaStCHEM surface science group, who study complex molecules on surfaces, probing the structure property-relationships employed in heterogeneous catalysis

• homogeneous catalysis

• nanotechnology

• coordination chemistry

• ligand design and supramolecular chemistry

• asymmetric catalysis

• heterocyclic chemistry

• the development of synthetic methods and strategies leading to the synthesis of biologically important molecules (including drug discovery)

• strongly correlated electronic materials

• battery and fuel cell materials and devices

• porous solids

• fundamental and applied electrochemistry polymer microarray technologies

• technique development for materials and nanomaterials analysis