Our lab is located on the second floor of the brand new RSC building. All hoods contain either a nitrogen manifold or full Schlenk line.

We use metal heating blocks (Radley heat-ons or Asynt DrySyns) to heat reactions, which means we don’t have to use oil baths (or clean up oil spills!). We’ve also recently replaced all our water condensers with CondenSyn air condensers, which save water, avoid floods and avoid tangles of condenser tubes. We teamed up with the nice people at Asynt to do some testing on these and found they work pretty damn well. If you’re into that kind of thing, you can read about it here: CondenSyn report.

We have some very nice balances: a 0.01 mg balance, and a very flash microgram balance (it actually reads to 0.1 micrograms!). These allow us to accurately weigh very small quantities of material, for example for host–guest binding studies.

We’ve recently purchased a bench-top centrifuge for isolating fine powders, and a programmable oven for controlled crystallisations. Additionally, we have access to a range of excellent facilities within the school, which you can read about here.