Profile

I’m from the East Midlands of England, I have worked and lived in the England, New Zealand, and Scotland.  I now live in Glasgow with my girlfriend and one (mostly friendly) cat.

As well as science I’m interested in the great outdoors, and enjoy hiking in Scotland.  I also really enjoy board games, my collection is now over 40 games.  Also I drink far too much coffee!

My specialist areas are Green Chemistry and Process Analysis – which is how to make chemicals in a more environmentally friendly way, and how to measure and control what you are making.  I have been working in this area for around 10 years on a wide range of topics from how to make chemicals out of waste wood to using lasers to measure hydrogen gas.

I currently work for the Centre for Process Analytics and Control Technology (CPACT, https://www.cpact.com/) which is a group of universities and industries working together to solve monitoring and control challenges in the “real world”.  I work with a small group of scientists and engineers at Strathclyde, but we often work with many people at other universities and businesses.  My job is very varied (which I like a lot) as I am involved in lab work to collect data, analysing data (not all from our lab), organising new experiments and projects, testing and developing software, writing reports, and presenting work to industry at meetings or webinars.  I also help out students with their research projects.

I spend about half of my time working in a lab, and about half the time in front of my PC working through data or reports (and coffee).

On days that I go to the lab I get up in time to have the all important morning coffee before setting off to the lab.  I usually arrive at the lab around 9 am.  The first thing I do is check that all the instruments I need are turned on and ready to use  – some take several hours to be ready, some only seconds.  In our group we have optical (light), acoustic (sound), and magnetic based measurement instruments.  Our instruments are mainly types that could also be applied in “real-world” settings such as a factory or out in the field.

E.g. the picture below shows a mini near infrared analyser.  Everything fits into a small box about the size of a matchbox.  This is ideal where portable measurements might be needed such as in a field or a warehouse.  The sample is placed directly on top of the sensor and can be measured through the glass bottom of the sample jar – no sample prep needed!

When not in the lab I’m looking at the data from our lab and others, and trying to work out if the signals we measure can be used to predict something useful, e.g. how much drug is present in a particular batch of tablets.  Often the data we get is “messy” because the samples contain many ingredients as well as the chemical we want to measure.  So to understand it we use complex data analysis techniques (chemometrics), some of which have been developed by CPACT members in the past.  I also dabble in making and testing software, so that others can use the data analysis techniques developed by our group.  E.g. some code and data I have been working on recently: