Our facility is amongst the most powerful and highest throughput of its type in the world. Its core business is to handle and examine samples that a typical academic crystallography unit cannot. Our research is based on the application of advanced crystallographic techniques to a range of chemical systems provided by our users.

The NCS users originate from over 30 different institutions.  A large amount of our users are based in chemistry departments, while the remaining originate from materials science, defence materials, pharmacy and biochemistry departments. The geographic spread of users is even and touches all regions of the UK.  

We have a team of scientists dedicated to supporting our vibrant community of users and over the many years of our operation this has resulted in a significant contribution to the academic literature and growth of crystallographic databases.  We use this expertise and experience to provide a variety of training from introductory understanding of crystal structures for synthetic chemists to tackling very difficult problems for expert crystallographers.