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.