I am currently employed as a Professor in the Chemistry Department of the University of Stellenbosch.

Broadly speaking, my research interests fall in the category of solid-state supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. More specifically, I am interested in interactions between solids and gases/vapors and related phase transition phenomena. I am also interested in crystal engineering involving (but not limited to) the fullerenes. For further details, here is my (reasonably) current publication list as a PDF file.

My research interests require extensive use of single crystal and powder diffraction techniques, as well as differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetric analysis. There are also some home-grown devices for kinetic and thermodynamic measurements, but I won't go into the details.

While I do not consider myself to be a crystallographer (my primary focus is the chemistry and not the analytical methodology), I believe that a sound practical knowledge of crystallography is essential to my kind of research. I also realized early on that being able to write software can be enormously useful for the control of experiments and the handling of data. Having completed some undergraduate computer science courses turned out to be extremely useful in this regard. Fortunately that was at the tail-end of the punchcard era, after which PCs were a very welcome sight.