Alexandra Slawin

Alexandra Martha Zoya Slawin (born 1961) is a British chemist and Professor at the University of St Andrews. Her research looks to understand the structure of supramolecular systems (e.g. rotaxanes and catenanes). She is generally considered as one of the world's leading crystallographers. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011.

Early life and education
Slawin studied chemistry at Imperial College London. After earning her bachelor's degree she worked at Imperial as an Experimental Officer on X-ray crystallography. She moved to the Loughborough University, where she completed a PhD on the crystal structures of organic and inorganic systems. She demonstrated how useful single cyrstal X-ray measurements were to better understand the structures of organic and inorganic solid-state systems. Toward the end of her thesis she started to focus on supramolecular chemistry, particularly macrocycles, rotaxanes and catenanes.

Research and career
Slawin joined the University of St Andrews in 1999. She was made a professor in 2004, and serves as Director of the Molecular Structure Lab. Her lab have sophisticated fully automated instrumentation for X-Ray Diffractio, including two rotating anodes and sensitive detectors. She called the system the Standard (St Andrews Automated Robotic Diffractometer), which she commercialised with Rigaku.

Slawin is one of the most frequent contributors to the Cambridge Crystallographic Database, having submitted over 3,500 entries. Slawin was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011. The Royal Society of Chemistry named her one of their Golden Authors in 2021.