Professor Lee Cronin

The Chemistry World article Building tomorrow’s nanofactory said

UK scientists have been granted £2.5 million to invent a nanomachine that can build materials molecule by molecule.
 
Such a robot doesn’t — and may never — exist, though it has been imagined for over half a century. But this autumn, researchers across the UK are starting work towards it, following the funding of three research projects by the Engineering and physical sciences research council.
 
“If it works, it will redefine nanotechnology as it should have been,” said Lee Cronin, an inorganic chemist at the University of Glasgow — referring to concepts promoted in the 1980s by US engineer Eric Drexler, who suggested that nanotechnology would create tiny machines dubbed ‘assemblers’ that could drag atoms and molecules around to make copies of themselves, or other useful devices.

Lee Cronin, Ph.D. is Professor of Chemistry and EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. His research group conducts research in inorganic chemistry, ligand design, self assembly, polyoxometalates, metal clusters, and the design of functional molecules with an emphasis working towards fundamentals that could be applied in molecular sub-nano and nanoscale science and nanotechnology. He collaborates with over ten other research groups in the UK, USA, Japan and Europe. His research is presently focusing in cluster chemistry and self assembly, in particular how we can design complex functional materials and components for molecular electronics, bio-molecule recognition and self assembly over multiple length scales.
 
Lee coauthored The imitation game — computational chemical approach to recognizing life, Noncovalently Connected Frameworks with Nanoscale Channels Assembled from a Tethered Polyoxometalate-Pyrene Hybrid, From polyoxometalate building blocks to polymers and materials: the silver connection, Polyoxometalate Clusters, Nanostructures and Materials: From Self Assembly to Designer Materials and Devices, Exploiting the Multifunctionality of Organocations in the Assembly of Hybrid Polyoxometalate Clusters and Networks, and Photonic crystal and photonic wire device structures. Read the full list of his publications!
 
He earned his BSc. (Hons) in Chemistry, First Class, at the University of York in 1994 and his DPhil. with “Ligand Design: New Small Molecule Models for Carbonic Anhydrase” at the University of York in 1997. He was Visiting Professor, University of Versailles, France in 2006. He is on the Editorial Board of Chemistry Central Journal.
 
Read Glasgow Scientists Crack Nanoscale Conundrum.