![]() With this special issue, we have sought to honor Roger’s scientific career as a community and to thank him for his huge devotion to the field and to the people he has worked with. students and PDRA fellows supervised, a countless number of collaborators, and a myriad of insightful contributions to the fields of crystallization and crystal engineering, Roger ( Figure 3) retired officially from the University of Manchester in 2020. (25,26)Īfter 25 years of academic work at Manchester, 200+ scientific publications, an army of Ph.D. This virtual special issue in Celebration of the Career of Roger Davey contains papers that deal with pharmaceutical materials (15−21) or arise from the collaboration between academia and the pharmaceutical industry (22−24) or come directly from the pharmaceutical industry. More than 20 crystallization scientists trained by Roger have gone on to work in the pharmaceutical industry for at least six different companies. Through better ways to discover and develop new crystallization processes and crystalline forms, and to tackle solid-state challenges, our society continues to benefit from pharmaceuticals that perform robustly to exacting requirements. Pharmaceutical companies responded by recruiting increasing numbers of crystallization scientists, many of whom came with Roger’s scientific approaches to crystallization, as well as the skills and conviction needed to convince skeptical colleagues to implement them. During the 1990s, this industry became more aware of the importance of crystal chemistry for intellectual property and pharmaceutical performance. However, it was the pharmaceutical industry that was to benefit most. ![]() The wide range of industries he has worked with is reflected here in contributions on batteries, (8) agrochemicals, (9) optoelectronics, (10−12) foodstuffs, (13,14) and fuels. Once in academia, Roger exploited his experience with ICI to be an effective collaborator with industry, understanding industrial perspectives and tailoring his scientific approach to solve their problems. ![]() In 2000, they collaborated on the book From Molecules to Crystallizers─their “manifesto” and thereafter required reading for any student in the field. At UMIST (which became part of The University of Manchester in 2004), Roger joined Professor John Garside, and together they led a world-leading crystallization group at Manchester. Two years later, his move into academia as a professor at the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) was assisted by Zeneca, demonstrating how highly he was valued by both industry and academia. Thus, when ICI created Zeneca in 1993 as a home for its organic businesses, it was natural that Roger became part of it. (4) However, Roger’s work on organic materials during his time at ICI─from hexamethylene tetramine (HMT) (5) through to flexible chiral agrochemical intermediates (6)─convinced him that there were greater opportunities for crystallization science in molecular crystals. Inorganic systems studied by Roger covered the periodic table, from sodium chloride (3) to barium sulfate ( Figure 2), the latter providing Roger’s first publication in Nature. Roger, always learning, did both─discovering a wide range of crystallization problems in both inorganic and organic systems all just waiting for a scientific approach. There was freedom to follow one’s own interests or align them to ICI activities. (2) ICI’s Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn (Cheshire) was filled with a rich array of practical and theoretical scientists, including many other future academics, a Fellow of the Royal Society (Derek Birchall), and a future Nobel Prize winner (Fraser Stoddard). Roger moved back to the UK in 1977 to join Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which then spanned the entire chemical industry across the former British Empire─even including the Magadi Soda Company in Kenya. The early experience of working outside the UK led him to many collaborations with continental Europe and beyond. (1) Ever since, Roger has always been a forensic interrogator of experimental data and experimental scientists. His first paper ( Figure 1) includes morphology determination, measurements of crystal growth rates, the implications of speciation, and analysis of impurities retained in the resulting crystals of ammonium dihydrogen phosphate (ADP). student at University College London with John Mullin, and postdoc at ETH Zurich with John Bourne. Roger began his scientific journey as a meticulous experimentalist─as an undergraduate at Bristol, Ph.D.
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