RSB Director's Seminar: Inferring how molecules behave from their interaction with light

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ABSTRACT

Molecules and molecular structures make up the world in which we live but they are too small to see directly, so we need to develop instrumentation that measures what they are and how they behave on a molecular scale. Before designing an experiment, it is important to decide what questions one needs to answer – sometimes a simple measurement is that is required. Reflecting back on David Craig’s research, this talk will show how polarised light enhances what we can measure with absorbance and emission spectroscopic techniques whether the target is DNA, a biopharmaceutical drug, or a bioactive product with a complex matrix. As we look forward to the future, it is important that molecular scientists emphasise doing chemistry sustainably. This often requires formulating a challenge, such as reducing the cost (financial, labour, environmental) of solvent disposal, and using our expertise, such as spectroscopy, to help solve it. Some ideas for this challenge will also be discussed.

BIOGRAPHY

Alison Rodger is a Scottish-Australian chemist who is a professor of chemistry at ANU. She earned her bachelor's, PhD and DSc from University of Sydney and continued her career at Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, Macquarie. The key theme of Alison Rodger’s research is development of new spectroscopic techniques and methods to study biomolecular structure and interactions. She integrates fundamental understanding of spectroscopic phenomena with knowledge of what instruments measure, to convert instrument output into molecular characterisation.