Profile

My work involves removing a material called cellulose from plants and using it to make plastics. Most plastics we use in everyday life, for water bottles, food packaging and even electronics (phones, laptops etc.) are made from oil which is running out. So I’m using plants to make these plastics instead. Another benefit of using plants instead of oil is that when you throw it away it breaks up and falls apart, like a leaf does, meaning less rubbish!

This is a plastic film I’ve made from a plant using the material called cellulose.

The machine above is called a “Plastograph”, it is basically a huge heated blender. I use it to mix materials together to make new materials!

I work for the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies (or CSCT for short). Everyone who works there is looking at environmentally friendly ways of doing science. If you’d like to find out more about the research that we do at the CSCT take a look at our website: http://www.bath.ac.uk/csct/

One of the great things about being a scientist is that everyday is different.

I work in lots of labs with lots of different people interested in making materials. I do this by removing the parts of plants that we need and turning them into sheets of plastic.

This is a picture of me using a fume hood, we use them when the materials or chemicals we use might be harmful to breath in. Unlucky for me they don’t make fume hoods for taller people, that’s why I’m doing the splits.

I look at the materials I have made using a machine called a “Scanning Electron Microscope” or SEM for short. It’s similar to a normal microscope but is much more powerful meaning I can look my materials much more closely and at much smaller things. The picture above was taken using the microscope and is of one my plastics.

You can see the scale bar at the bottom (the short white line) which says 100μm which means 100 micrometers. This is 0.01 cm about the thickness of 4 pieces of paper stacked on top of each other.

I also find myself reading a lot of scientific papers and email checking in my office, which I share with 7 other people.

I also help set up conferences where lots of scientists and other clever people come together to discuss their work. These often involve “poster sessions” where you sum up the work you do in one poster.

Sometime I get to play around with liquid nitrogen which is -196°C and freezes almost everything.

If you’d like to learn more about liquid nitrogen or chemistry in general you should look at our friends at The University of Nottingham’s youtube channel called: Periodic Videos. It’s a brilliant channel with loads of facts and exciting experiments.

Here’s what they had to say about Nitrogen.