Profile

I have a few hobbies which I do tend to get all technical about. I bought a sack of white flour and worked out the very best, tastiest recipe for vegan white bread using a far too rigorous set of experiments. I like being outdoors whether it’s growing food and vegetables to eat or walking. I have just started trying to photograph all 59 varieties of UK butterfly, and I have decent photos of about 20 of them so far (some of them are difficult to tell apart!). If it’s raining, I’ll watch TV (sci fi stuff) or play on the PS4.

This is a picture of a speckled wood butterfly taken on a mobile phone and identified by its picture recognition software.

A loaf of bread I baked.

I like looking at art and visiting galleries and museums around the UK. In the last year I have seen wondrous things in Stoke, Norwich and Aberdeen.

My research has covered a lot of topics.

I work on making plastics which are recyclable and so aren’t thrown away after one use. Nature has lots of materials which we can use to either inspire us to make better plastics or to create new materials never seen before. I try to use chemistry that is as sustainable as possible and has the least environmental impact

I work on making plastics which repair themselves because that will make something last longer which is important if the plastic is in an undersea cable or in a satellite in orbit.

This is a self-healing plastic. We cut it, pushed the ends together and it is once again strong enough to hang a weight from

One application of plastic I work on is making coatings. Coatings are things like paint (like on walls or ceilings), packaging (like on food from the supermarket) and antimicrobial surfaces (which can kills bacteria and viruses).

I also like to measure and analyse materials to see what they can do and even identify them if that isn’t known – I have work with art historians wanting to identify the types of paint a dead artist has used to the painting can be repaired, dated or proven to be authentic!

This picture shows a pot of paint from a famous artist’s studio and a chemical fingerprint that shows it was used in a specific work of art.

The chemistry I am interested in needs to be done in a laboratory, and my role is to think up ideas for new experiments and then work with people in my team to see if these ideas work. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. If an experiment doesn’t work, you often find something interesting you hadn’t thought of, and that is the excitement of chemistry.

I teach chemistry to students, which can either mean lecturing (standing at the front of the classroom and talking through new subjects the students need to learn for their course, and answering chemistry questions either during the session or at the end), tutorials (a small number of students and a member of staff discuss a chemistry topic and together work through questions on it) or laboratory sessions (doing chemistry hands -on… every likes to get on with an experiment themselves, myself included)