Structuring a crystallographic database

Matt Lightfoot is a chemist who hasn’t worked in a lab for almost 20 years. ‘But doing this job, you’re surrounded by chemistry,’ he says.

As principal scientific editor at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), Lightfoot helps to look after the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), a repository of organic and organometallic crystal structures that has been collecting compounds since the 1960s. Earlier this year the CSD celebrated an important milestone – its one millionth structure.