Professor Simon J Coles FRSC, SFHEA
Professor of Structural Chemistry, Director, UK National Crystallography Service

Professor Simon J Coles is Professor of Structural Chemistry and Director of both the UK National Crystallography Service and the UK Physical Sciences Data Science Service within Chemistry at the University of Southampton.
Simon Coles obtained his BSc and PhD at the University of Wales, Cardiff in 1992 and 1997 respectively. Simon's PhD was in structural systematics and molecular modelling, which he undertook whilst working part-time for the National Crystallography Service, both under the supervision of Professor Mike Hursthouse. On completion of his thesis he moved to a PDRA appointment with the Royal Institution, but based at the CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, where he worked with a collaborative team to build the highly successful Small Molecule Single Crystal beamline, 9.8. In 1998 Simon again joined forces with Mike Hursthouse when he moved to Southampton to establish a new laboratory and manage the National Crystallography Service. Simon transferred to Chemistry staff in July 2009 and took over the role of Director of the National Crystallography Service.
In addition to directing the National Crystallography Service and maintaining a cutting edge facility for all UK academia, Simon has diverse research interests in and is truly multidisciplinary. Structural Chemistry research interests include the study of solid-state reactions and transformations, structural systematics, the determination of charge density distributions and their application to reactivity and solid state behaviour, discovering and investigating structure-property relationships and crystal growth. Further structural science research is built on collaborations with the areas of macromolecular crystallography (Biology), SHG laser spectroscopy (Physics), CT Imaging (Engineering) and 3D Inkjet Printing (Engineering). In addition over the last decade Simon has been awarded a number of grants in the areas of Information Management, eResearch and eLearning.
Simon is an author on over 600 papers covering the areas structural chemistry, support for chemical synthesis and chemical information. He has served on a number British Crystallography Association committee positions including Chair of the Young Crystallographer Group and Chair of the Chemical Crystallography Group - he is currently the Education and Outreach Coordinator serving on Council. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Crystallography Reviews, Chemistry Central (Section Editor), Supramolecular Chemistry and International Journal of Digital Curation journals as well as participating on a number of peer-review committees for research councils (JISC, EPSRC and the Australian Research Council) and Central Facilities (Diamond Light Source, ISIS and ALS). Simon contributes to the steering groups of the Digital Economy and Computationally Intensive Imaging USRGs, Diamond Light Source, the EU eInfrastructure Policy Forum and a number of JISC projects and programmes.
Simon is the Director of an MSc programme in Instrumental Analytical Chemistry and is also the academic champion for Sustainability in Chemistry and is driving forward a number of projects to reduce our carbon footprint.