Chemical Crystallography

In Nijmegen, Chemical Crystallography is part of the Solid State Chemistry department which participates in the Institute for Molecules and Materials (IMM). The IMM is an interdisciplinary Graduate Research School within the Faculty of Science of the Radboud University Nijmegen. The research of the IMM focuses on the design and understanding of functional (bio)materials.
Both single-crystal and powder diffraction methods are used for structure analysis and for the determination of the dynamics of chemical and physical processes on a molecular scale. Special attention is paid to the study of (pseudo)polymorphism and solvates of pharmaceuticals and to datamining of crystallographic databases. New methods to extract structural information from powder diffraction data are being developed. Structure comparison techniques in combination with chemometrical approaches are used to reveal new relations and systematics in structural databases like the ICSD, the CSD and PDB data banks. A new direction of research is the design and study of functional crystalline materials with applications in areas like gas storage, catalysis and separation science.