Our goal is to develop an anti-malarial Trojan horse that will deliver a chemical payload to the malaria parasite that it cannot avoid, thus limiting the potential for resistance.

This project uses robotics and high-throughput platforms to accelerate chemoselective reaction development in small molecules and peptides, focusing on photochemical and electrochemical methods to create bioactive libraries for drug discovery.

This project will involve a reasonable amount of organic synthesis, as well as some host-guest binding studies and potentially some X-ray crystallography.

We hope that these will give interesting catalytic properties as we will be able to incorporate coordinatively unsaturated metal ions next to a well-defined 3D binding pocket. This will be studied in collaboration with the Colebatch group.

Our approach to more efficient synthesis uses domino reactions, which are spectacular events that assemble organic compounds quickly by forming many new covalent bonds in a single synthetic operation.

This project will explore additional opportunities for the efficient electrochemical modification of peptides, including through the use of novel “electrochemically-active” amino acids.

This project involves designing and developing new recognition motifs to assemble H-bonded frameworks, and using different interactions such as halogen bonding and chalcogen bonding to prepare frameworks.

The project will involve training in the use of highly reactive, air-sensitive reagents which require handling under strict anaerobic conditions, therefore training in strict air-sensitive chemistry will be given. X-ray crystallography and multinuclear NMR spectroscopy are the common characterization techniques that will be used on a daily basis.

This project explores solvent-free mechanochemical synthesis to reduce the environmental impact of chemical research. By developing sustainable routes for widely used compounds, it aims to cut CO₂ emissions and promote greener practices in academic and industrial chemistry.

This project develops high-frequency molecular qubits using heavy p-block radicals to enhance quantum coherence and sensitivity. It involves synthesis under anaerobic conditions, EPR and NMR spectroscopy, and computational analysis to advance quantum computing technologies.

This project will involve the synthesis of new organic and organometallic switches and characterization of their accessible states using various techniques including UV/vis/NIR/IR spectroelectrochemistry.

Structurally complex organic natural products are the basis of most of our medicines, and people trained in their
preparation are employed in discovery and process chemistry research units of pharmaceutical companies.

This project will synthesize foldamers decorated with emissive groups such as pyrene.

This project will explore the synthesis and chemistry of new group 6/group 9 mixed-metal clusters. The selectivity for certain types of catalysis will be explored in collaboration with the State Key Laboratory for Catalysis, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Malins group is interested in several anti-cancer, antimalarial, and antibiotic peptides. 2023-2024 projects in this space will involve the chemical synthesis, structural modification, and biological evaluation of peptide leads as next-generation therapies.