Profile

My background is synthetic inorganic chemistry, which is a fancy way of saying I make things using the middle bit of the periodic table (the transition metals). My lab makes big molecules that look a lot like wheels (which is what we call them). My PhD is on nanoscience, which is the study of things that are bigger than molecules but small enough that the laws of physics are still very weird. I’m using my skills to take these molecules and try and stick them to surfaces in particular patterns so we can make a computer chip. Have a look at http://www.molmag.manchester.ac.uk/ if you want to see my group’s website and get some more information on what we do.

At the moment, the important part of a computer chip (the transistors) are about 20 nanometers, or about 1000 times smaller than a human hair. The size of the transistors is controlled by how we make them. As the transistors get smaller, there are a lot of problems with the laws of physics. If we can make a chip with molecules as the transistors, we can avoid a lot of the problems and make our transistors 10 times smaller.

To be honest, I don’t have a typical day, apart from coffee. One of the good things about being a scientist is the constantly changing challenge. It’s hard to get bored. Often I’ll be working in my lab in Manchester, I try and split my day between doing new experiments in the lab, looking at the results from my last experiments to figure out what to do next, or reading work from other scientists to get new ideas. When a scientist publishes their work for other scientists to see, we call their work a paper. A lot of what I do involves reading these papers to understand the experiments they’ve done and if I learn anything from them.

Sometimes I get to go travelling as part of my job. I get to spend part of my time traveling to conferences to share my work, been to Spain (Cuenca) and America (San Diego) as well as a few conferences around the UK. I also go to visit research facilities around the world.  I’ve spent time working at a big facility near Oxford (The Diamond Light Source) and at a nuclear reactor in Grenoble (The Institute Laue-Langevin, a very, very cool place to visit).