Dr Scott Turner was awarded his first degree and Ph.D. (1994) from the University of Manchester, UK. He then held a NATO Research Fellowship with the late Professor Olivier Kahn at the Université de Paris-Sud XI and subsequently at the Institut de Chimie Matière Condensée de Bordeaux (ICMCB) (1994-96). Following his French sojourn he returned to the UK as an EPSRC PDRA working with Prof Peter Day FRS at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, famed for its Christmas Lecture series and solid state chemistry research (1996-2004).

After a brief stint as a lecturer at Exeter University, just prior to the closure of its chemistry department (2004-2005), he had a briefer stint as a Davy-Faraday Laboratory Research Fellow at the Royal Institution and UCL (2005) before becoming a Teaching and Research Fellow at Warwick University (2005-2008). This was followed by the briefest stint as a Teaching Fellow at Nottingham University (Feb. 2009 – April 2009). Dr Turner was appointed to a senior lectureship in Solid State Materials in May 2009.

Our research interests are concerned with the preparation and characterisation of functional molecular based materials. Our current focus is on charge transfer and cation radical salts that show appreciable electrical and/or ionic transport - ranging from semiconductors, through metals to the occasional superconductor. We are also interested in incorporating another property or properties into the conducting lattice with the aim of observing a synergy between it or them and the conductivity. The non-transport property could be long range magnetic order, spin-crossover, photophysical properties, chirality or structural transitions induced by pressure and/or temperature changes. An overall theme is that the properties often emerge as functions of a solid-state collection of molecules and so the functionality is mediated by non-covalent intermolecular interactions. This generally means that small and apparently trivial chemical changes can often dramatically affect the physical properties. Synergy, such as between electrical conductivity and ferromagnetic order is expected to be important for novel molecular based materials in applications such as sensors, electrical switches and spintronic devices. The group has an emerging interest in not only investigating and enhancing the fundamental properties of these materials, but also in looking into routes to incorporate them into devices in the form of thin films, composites or microcrystals.

Akutsu H, Ishihara K, Yamada J-I, Nakatsuji S, Turner SS, Nakazawa Y. (2016) 'A strongly polarized organic conductor'. Cryst Eng Chem, 18 (42), pp. 8151-8154. doi: 10.1039/c6ce01865c Akutsu H, Hashimoto R, Yamada J-I, Nakatsuji S, Nakazawa Y, Turner SS. (2015) 'Structures and properties of new ferrocene-based paramagnetic anion octamethylferrocenedisulfonate and its ITF salt'. INORGANIC CHEMISTRY COMMUNICATIONS, 61, pp. 41-47. doi: 10.1016/j.inoche.2015.08.018 Li L, Clarkson GJ, Lees MR, Howson SE, Tan SY, Turner SS, Scott P. (2015) 'Iron and Manganese Complexes of 2-Carbonyl Pyrrolyls: Scorpionate Sandwich Anions and Extended Structures'. Organometallics, 34 (11), pp. 2543-2549. doi: 10.1021/om501218a Akutsu H, Yamada JI, Nakatsuji S, Turner SS. (2014) 'Crystal structure of PPh4[Fe(NO)2Cl2]'. X-ray Structure Analysis Online, 30 (10), pp. 49-50.