School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh

The department has occupied many sites in its history, from a house at the top of Robertson's Close in the city centre, to purpose-built facilities in the central campus at Old College through to its current location at King's Buildings.

Each move has brought with it expansions in size and status until the department occupied the position it does now, as one of the world's leading Chemistry teaching and research establishments.

EaStCHEM comes joint 4th in the Grade Point Average (GPA) metric, and first when staff numbers are factored in (the power ranking).

[citation needed] The School has four major research themes as part of EaStCHEM: The Chemistry/Biology Interface area is broad, with particular strengths in the areas of protein structure and function, mechanistic enzymology, proteomics, biologically targeted synthesis, the application of high throughput and combinatorial approaches and biophysical chemistry, which focuses on the development and application of physicochemical techniques to biological systems.

Areas of expertise include probing molecular structure in the gas phase, clusters and nanoparticles, the development and application of physicochemical techniques such as mass spectrometry to molecular systems and the EaStCHEM surface science group, who study complex molecules on surfaces, probing the structure property-relationships employed in heterogeneous catalysis.