Working with industry

The Department of Chemistry has strong links with industry. Many of our undergraduates take the opportunity to spend a year in Industry as part of their course. In addition to this we have many outside lecturers from Industry who contribute their invaluable expertise to our taught modules. These include Drs Tina Lovelock and David Rendle who have spent many years in the area of Forensic Analysis, and Dr Samantha Atkinson who is a Good Laboratory Practice Inspector at the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority. A Part 4 module entitled Industrial Chemistry is an option for all our final year MChem students. This module is taught entirely by visiting industrialists from a variety of backgrounds. Dr John Skidmore (GSK) delivers an overview of the drug-discovery process from the medicinal chemists viewpoint; Professor David Thornthwaite (Unilever) provides insight into how chemistry research enables the development of many household products; Dr John Couves (BP) provides an inorganic chemist's viewpoint on the economics and viability of metal-catalysed chemical reactions at the manufacturing scale, and Dr David Price (AWE) provides a review of molecular modelling and computational chemistry as tools to assess many aspects of chemical reactivity and material design.

We also have a wide range of collaborative research programmes with industry. Some 40% of our present cohort of PhD students are funded through collaborative industrial studentships. Companies with significant current research links to Chemistry include AstraZeneca, Unilever, BioInteractions, CEM Analytical Services, Cytec UK, Dextra Laboratories, AWE, Eli Lilley, Dow Corning, DuPont, GlaxoSmithKline, Hofmann la Roche, Johnson Matthey, ICI-National Starch, Pfizer, Smith Detection and Xenova.