WestCHEM

WestCHEM, the joint Research School of Chemistry for the West of Scotland, was founded in 2005 as an internationally leading Research School in Chemical Sciences, delivering forefront chemistry research in state-of-the-art laboratories, and educating tomorrow's leaders through chemistry.

International academic collaborations

WestCHEM members have been active in establishing formal MoUs with leading research institutions across the world, partly supported by EPSRC’s Global Engagement Award and stimulated by our commitment to provide international experience for our PGRs. The award allowed academics to forge international networks with the aim of creating sustainable research relationships. More than 16 exchanges and several fact-finding visits have taken place within WestCHEM (including Stanford, Tsinghua, Nanyang Technical University,Osaka University, IIT Bombay) and these significantly enhanced our internationalisation collaboration agenda. International research collaboration is further supported in part by external funds such as UKIERI, JSPS Fellowships (Prunet, 2010, Marquez, 2011), NSF–EPSRC awards (Cooke, 2010, Kadodwala, 2013), NSF-EPSRC and NSF-BBSRC (Cronin, 2011 and 2010).

Strategic Partnerships

  • Korean Institute for the Advancement of Technology (KIAT)
  • GSK
  • GSK Postgraduate Doctoral Training Centre

Facilities

In addition to our unique core facilities, members of WestCHEM regularly use other world-leading facilities at both institutions such as the Kelvin Nanocharacterisation Centre and the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre at Glasgow University, which houses more than £20M of nanofabrication equipment in a 750 m2 clean room. WestCHEM staff have been particularly successful securing funding for access to central RCUK facilities amounting to £1.5M per annum over the assessment period. This involves neutron scattering experiments at ISIS but in particular beam time at the Diamond Light Source for x-ray crystallography. 

The Glasgow Centre for Physical Organic Chemistry

Collaboration – We place a heavy emphasis on collaboration within WestCHEM and with partners outside the research school, particularly from different disciplines. The Glasgow Centre for Physical Organic Chemistry (established with a grant of £4.8M) is a prime example of internal collaboration and emerging activities in Chemical Biology provide a strong linkage to researchers in the life sciences in the host institutions and beyond.