Liana read for a Bachelor of Pharmacy [Hons] degree at the University of Malta and worked in the pharmaceutical industry before moving to Birmingham, UK in 2004 to carry out her EPSRC-funded doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr Maryjane Tremayne. Her work was centered around the complementary use of computational crystal structures and X-ray powder diffraction data in crystal structure determination, and formed part of the CPOSS (Control and Prediction of the Organic Solid State) project (www.cposs.org.uk).

Before joining the University of Malta's Department of Chemistry as a Lecturer, Liana held postdoctoral fellowships, also had a brief stint in an industrial setting, having worked for generic pharmaceutical companies and Heritage Malta, with whom she has formed collaborative links. During her time at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany (www.fkf.mpg.de), she worked in Prof. Dr Robert Dinnebier's group on exploring variable temperature and pressure environments in structure determination of organic and pharmaceutical compounds from high-resolution powder diffraction data. She then moved to Prof. Dr John S.O. Evans's group at the Chemistry Department, University of Durham, UK (www.dur.ac.uk) where she expanded her research to include inorganic structures and single crystal diffraction techniques, whilst maintaining a steady research output in the field of pharmaceutical crystallography and crystal engineering.

Liana was promoted to Associate Professor in March 2018, and she is currently the Outreach Officer for the Department of Chemistry. In 2018 Liana, together with two colleagues from the University of Malta, secured a EUR 4.8M grant to set up a new Centre for Solid State Research in Malta. This has enabled the purchase of top notch instrumentation and the creation of a centre of excellence.

When she is not in the lab, Liana is either caring for her son, or teaching classical ballet.

Marie Christine's interest in covalent organic frameworks was sparked when she joined the group as an undergraduate project student in 2014. Through her hard work she has sailed through her Bachelor and Masters studies with flying colours, and she was awarded a TESS scholarship to further her studies at a doctoral level. Marie Christine defended her PhD dissertation in February 2022, and she is currently our full-time Scientific Officer.

Luke joined the group as a summer intern in 2014, and has never looked back since. His undergraduate project was an industrial collaboration sponsored by DiPharma, and his MSc work also involved the investigation of polymorphism and crystal engineering in pharmaceuticals. For his doctoral work, Luke has chosen to move away from Pharma and is instead challenging the boundaries of cocrystallisation on a cometary level.

Lynn has shown interest in crystallography since she was a first year student on the BSc Chemistry with Materials course. She worked on polymorphism and crystal engineering of pharmaceuticals for her undergraduate project, which she completed in 2018. Lynn was awarded a TESS scholarship to further her studies, and she immediately started reading for a PhD with the group, this time focusing on materials that have the potential to exhibit negative or zero thermal expansion.

Lorella joined us as a BSc project student in 2016, to work on the application of statistical techniques in the context of crystallography. Her undergraduate work, which has been published, has served as the background to her subsequent MSc project, which she has passed with Distinction. After a brief stint out in the real world, Lorella decided to deepen her understanding of the complementary use of statistics and crystallography, so she returned in October 2019 as a PhD student.

Having joined our group as an undergrad in 2019, Rebecca has applied crystallography principles for the understanding of a prevalent pigment in the context of cultural heritage. Her MSc research project builds upon this work and extends to another pigment that is visually similar but chemically very different to the first. Rebecca's work has attracted much attention both in the local and global heritage science scene, and has served as a platform to initiate several fruitful collaborations.