Coming soon: multi-million pound laboratory investment

We’re investing £12m in our facilities, including a complete renovation of our teaching labs, ready for students joining us in 2019.

This refurbishment will ensure our students benefit from an outstanding educational experience. It will provide students with modern, state-of-the-art teaching spaces and more opportunities for experimental work and hands-on use of advanced analytical and spectroscopic equipment.

Our £12m refurbishment will:

• fully upgrade the undergraduate teaching laboratories in Chemistry enabling us to provide an excellent student experience. There will be a laboratory dedicated to synthetic chemistry, and another focussed on measurements.
• modernise existing laboratory equipment and introduce new facilities including nuclear magnetic resonance and diffraction equipment.
• upgrade the laboratory IT system so that students can process their data in parallel with experimental work, transforming the experience of the most data-intensive experiments. This will also enable students to prepare and submit some assignments during laboratory classes.
• introduce new high-tech display systems in the laboratories and breakout rooms, to facilitate advance presentations of techniques, and group discussions around the data students gather in their experiments. We’ll also provide electronic laboratory notebooks in the laboratories, to support our students in their studies.
• prepare our students for future employment; they’ll be using facilities and equipment which mirror those used in modern chemistry laboratories in industry
• improve accessibility for all of our students, including providing variable-height benching and a new student entrance and locker space on the ground floor
• help us to become more sustainable by increasing energy efficiency, improving thermal insulation, and lowering our water usage

Image: Artist's impression of new state-of-the-art Chemistry laboratories

Videos: Artist’s interpretation of what the laboratories will look like; this isn’t an exact representation of the final laboratory.