Research Associate
BSc, PhD
Phone: +61 8 6488 3157
Email: alexandre.sobolev@uwa.edu.au
Biography
Dr. Alexandre Sobolev trained as a crystallographer in Russia, ultimately developing, from an undergraduate physics background, a chemical specialization in the 'small molecule' field. He rose to Senior Scientist in charge of these activities in the Laboratory of Chemical Crystallography and Structure Analysis at the Karpov Physico-Chemical Research Institute (Moscow) over a period of twenty years.
Dr Sobolev arrived in Australia in 1992 to join the research group of Prof. B.N. Figgis FAA at UWA, initially to participate in the construction, programming and commissioning of a 'Larsen-type' single crystal four-circle X-ray diffractometer operating at about 10 K, one of the very few in the world, and the only one in the Southern Hemisphere. The machine was required for the acquisition of very high-quality data for is charge/spin-density determination project and was associated with that activity throughout the ensuing decade. More broadly, Dr Sobelev has frequently advised the faculty of the Chemistry Discipline on the suitability of their compounds for structure determination and on the interpretation of the results.
Since 2005 Dr Sobolev has held a position of Research Associate in the School of Biomedical, Biomolecular and Chemical Sciences at UWA as an expert in crystal chemistry and X-ray structure analysis in cooperation with the large research group of Prof. Raston.
Research
Dr Sobolev researches the characterization of self-assembled Host-Guest macromolecular complexes, involving the crystal chemistry of supramolecular compounds in which the number of non-hydrogen atoms in the crystallographic asymmetric unit is estimated in hundreds, intermediate between small molecule and protein crystallography. Here critical problems arise, connected with the physical properties of such crystals, such as the dynamics of molecules in the crystal, their full or fragmentary disorder, the presence of a large number of solvent molecules and crystalline water molecules, which lead to a significant decrease in quality of experimental X-ray data and the resolution of the structure. This, in consequence, requires considerable expertise and effort during the structure solving procedure and subsequent structure refinement. In this area, consideration of strategy of the X-ray experiment on crystals of such compounds is often comparable to those for electron charge density studies. Some of these supramolecular compounds have a practical application as a coating material of nano-particles synthesized at the Centre for Strategic Nano-Fabrication, UWA. Dr Sobolev is also responsible for characterization of newly synthesized nano-materials by PXRD technique realized on Oxford Diffraction Gemini-R CCD diffractometer.
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