Celebrating 275 years of Chemistry
Established in 1747, the school is the third oldest in the UK and is routinely ranked in the top 100 departments globally and in the top 10 in the UK for teaching and research. It has 100+ research and technical staff, 160+ research students and more than £7 million of annual investment to undertake world-changing teaching and research.
Five Nobel Prize winners are among its former students and staff, including most recently Professor Sir David MacMillan, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2021, and it hosts the prestigious Regius Chair in Chemistry, founded in 1817.
The school has played host to numerous world-changing discoveries:
- In 1762, James Black announced his theory of latent heat, paving the way for another Glasgow luminary, James Watt, to develop the steam engine, and the Industrial Revolution that followed.
- In 1792, Glasgow chemist and medic Thomas Charles Hope confirmed the new element strontites, which later became strontium.
- In 1913, Frederick Soddy introduced the world to isotopes. Soddy was a pioneer in the understanding of radioactivity and the first to describe different forms of the same elements as isotopes.
- Chemistry at Glasgow has always been at the forefront of X-ray crystallography and in 1995 the structure of the Photosystem II light harvesting protein was determined in the school, revolutionising our understanding of photosynthesis in plants.
Over 300 undergraduates and 150 postgraduates take programmes in the school every year.
Research in the school encompasses:
- work developing new probes for medical imaging and diagnostics
- synthesising the next generation of antibiotics, chemotherapeutics and drug-delivery systems
- building and studying high-performance light-harvesting and light-emitting materials, at the single molecule scale
- creating greener industrial systems and products
- digitising chemistry so that molecules and nanostructures that have never even been dreamed of before can be built in automated systems.
"As the school celebrates the past 275 years of a proud history and marks the magnificent achievement of our alumnus Professor Sir David MacMillan upon winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, so we look forward to our future, building upon the significant strengths and breadth of our current portfolio of research," said Head of School, Professor Justin Hargreaves.
This article was first published June 2022.