Prof. Dr. Alexandra M. Z. Slawin was the first female professor of chemistry at the University of St Andrews, the third oldest university in the UK. She has published over 1200 papers. She is a specialist in small molecule X-ray crystallography and directs a facility containing six diffractometers. Her early education was at Imperial College where she obtained her degree. After five years at the University of Loughborough, where she obtained her PhD, she moved to St Andrews in 1999, becoming a full professor in 2007. She was elected into the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2009. Her interests are broad, spanning from nanomaterials and organic chemistry to supramolecular chemistry, with highly cited papers in all these areas. She was highlighted as a rare woman in the top fifty authors in Angewandte Chemie and as the fifth largest contributor to the Cambridge Crystallographic database, the international repository for single crystal data for C-H-containing molecules, which has over one million entries.