Organic crystals have been traditionally viewed as a ‘chemical graveyard’, where molecules are trapped in a rigid framework. Since Aristoteles's statement that ‘molecules cannot react unless as liquids or if dissolved’, the scientific community has long viewed the organic solid state as being rather benign. These views are, however, far from the truth, and growing efforts are being devoted to understanding just how reactive and responsive the organic solid state really is.

The morning will start with a lecture to provide an introduction to the organic solid state, and some of the exciting discoveries of its reactivity under a range of stimuli, including heat, light, and mechanical strain. We will emphasise the importance of this stimuli-responsive behaviour for tackling global energy and climate challenges. To follow, our speaker will highlight their own contributions in the field of mechanically responsive solids with emphasis on new theoretical understanding of explosive initiation, atomistic mechanisms of mechanical flexibility in molecular crystals, and new techniques being developed to study and understand environmentally sustainable mechanochemical reactions.

About the speaker

Dr Adam Michalchuk is Assistant Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Birmingham. Originally from Canada’s west coast, Adam got his MChem in Materials Chemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 2014. He then pursued his PhD research between the University of Edinburgh, UK, and Novosibirsk State University, Russia, studying the structural dynamics of molecular solids from both a simulation and experimental point of view. After his PhD, in 2018 Adam moved to Berlin, Germany as a postdoctoral at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM). Here his research focused on developing synchrotron-based diffraction and spectroscopic methods to study solid-state reactions in situ. Adam was simultaneously a guest scientist at the Free University Berlin in the Department of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry. He was promoted to Senior Scientist at the BAM in 2021.

In October 2022 Adam moved to the University of Birmingham, where he leads an interdisciplinary research team with the aim of understanding how to control chemical reactivity (usually in the solid state) using mechanical force.