Introduction

I went to school at the local comprehensive (Grove School, Market Drayton) and then studied for both by undergraduate and doctoral degrees in chemistry at Jesus College, Oxford. After seven years in Oxford, I then spent two years in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Notre Dame, and a brief period as a research fellow at Imperial College London, before getting my first academic post at Cardiff University in 1998. In 2007 I returned to Oxford to take up my current position at Queen’s.

Teaching

I teach the entire breadth of the core course in inorganic chemistry to first, second and third year undergraduates at Queen’s, together with option topics in spectroscopy and organometallic chemistry. I also typically supervise three or four Part 2 (fourth year) chemistry undergraduates during their laboratory projects, together with around six graduate (DPhil) students and two or three post-doctoral researchers.

Research

My research interests are broadly in organometallic chemistry – that is the chemistry of compounds featuring bonds between carbon and a metal. Much of the work of my research group in this area is focussed either on fundamental aspects (such as how to make new types of chemical bond and discover how they react) or on applications of new compounds to real world problems (such as the design of chemical sensors or catalysts).

Publications

• The Group 13 Metals Aluminium, Gallium, Indium and Thallium: Chemical Patterns and Peculiarities Eds. S. Aldridge and A.J. Downs, Wiley, 2011.
• AND/NOT Sensing of Fluoride and Cyanide by Ferrocene Derivatized Lewis Acids A.E.J. Broomsgrove, D. Addy, C. Bresner, I.A. Fallis, A.L. Thompson and S. Aldridge. Chemistry- a European Journal, 2008, 14, 7525-7529.
• A Stable Two-Coordinate Acyclic Silylene A.V. Protchenko, K. Hassomal Birjkumar, D. Dange, A.D. Schwarz, D. Vidovic, C. Jones, N. Kaltsoyannis, P. Mountford and S. Aldridge. J. Am. Chem. Soc, 2012, 134, 6500-6503.
• Cationic Terminal Gallylene Complexes by Halide Abstraction: Coordination Chemistry of a Valence Isoelectronic Analogue of CO and N2 N.D. Coombs, D. Vidovic, J.K. Day, A.L. Thompson, A. Stasch, W. Clegg, L. Russo, L. Male, M.B. Hursthouse, D.J. Willock and S. Aldridge J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2008, 130, 16111-16124.
• Extending the chain: synthetic, structural and reaction chemistry of a BN allenylidene analogue J. Niemeyer, D.A. Addy, A.L. Thompson, M. Kelly and S. Aldridge. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2011, 50, 8908-8911.