My research interests are in the area of metallo-supramolecular chemistry. I am particularly interested in the self-assembly of discrete nanoscale metal-organic cages, with well defined internal pockets, allowing guest species to be bound and the chemical reactivity of these guests to be modified. Such host molecules have potential applications ranging from the protection of sensitive chemical species to catalysis to the separation and purification of substrates as diverse as gases, gold compounds, and fullerenes. The Nitschke group has prepared a variety of three-dimensional metal-organic container molecules through subcomponent self-assembly, whereby dynamic-covalent (C=N) and coordinative (N→M) bonds are formed during the same self-assembly process to build up complex structures in a single reaction step. An inherent advantage is of this approach is that the properties of the resulting assemblies can be readily altered through variation of the subcomponents employed, for example we have shown (see 10.1002/chem.201203751) that simply changing the metal ion in a M4L6 tetrahedron from iron(II) to cobalt(II) increases the size of the interior cavity of the cage and allows encapsulation of larger guest molecules.