Firstly I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. J. K. M. Sanders for giving me the opportunity to carry out this work and for his support. I would also like to thank Dr. T. Rayment for supervision of my surface chemistry, and my industrial supervisors Drs. A. Lavery and A. Bisson.
On the synthetic side of my work, I am grateful to Scott Darling for much advice and inspiration regarding multiporphyrin assembly. Drs. Hee-Joon Kim and Moshe Nakash are also thanked for discussing their synthetic and computational results. I am indebted to Dr. Neil Feeder for solving and refining the many crystal structures presented here. Drs. J. E. Davies and S. J. Teat (Daresbury Laboratory) are also thanked for their contributions to crystallography. Dr. L. Prodi (Universitą degli Studi di Bologna) is thanked for photophysical measurements, and P. Goh for an introduction to Os cluster chemistry.
I would like to thank the rest of the Sanders group, past and present, for discussions, spectra, proof reading and much friendship.
Regarding surface chemistry, I would like to thank Rachel McKendry and the Rayment group for showing me the ropes. I am very grateful to Prof. D. N. Reinhoudt for use of facilities (contact angle, electrochemistry) at the University of Twente, to Prof. F. C. J. M. van Veggel, M. Beulen, A. Friggeri, M. Liebau, S. Flink and S. Levi for help with experiments and interpretation, and the European Science Foundation for funding my visit to Twente. I would like to thank Dr. Q. Guo and E. Green (School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham) for use of their STM, C. Fellows (ThermoUnicam, Cambridge) for use of a reflection - adsorption IR spectrometer, N. Malone (LGC, Runcorn) for access to XPS facilities, the Device Materials group (Dept. of Materials Science, Cambridge) for use of their AFM, and Dr. H.-L. Zhang (Dept. of Physics, University of Leeds) for measuring XP spectra.
The technical staff at the Department of Chemistry are thanked for everything from the NMR and mass spectrometry services to gold evaporation.
I would especially like to thank my family for their love and for putting up with my perpetual whinging and whining.
Finally I am grateful to EPSRC and Avecia for funding.