Profile

One of the biggest themes in my life has been music. When I was 8, I trained for 6 years as a cathedral chorister. I was in many singing groups for a lot of years but I also play piano and guitar. My tastes are eclectic and I try and listen to a lot of different things.

I enjoy reading a lot of different materials, both fiction and non-fiction, including history and popular science.

Finally I love food and drink and enjoy cooking for lots of people for big parties and small gatherings.

I work in Nanoscience mostly with electron microscopes. This means that my work is mostly involved in working in a room with an 8 foot tall, stainless steel machine that is designed to look at the smallest things we can see – atoms and molecules. It’s my job to see how objects behave so that we can bring new conclusions to all areas of life. This includes developing electronics and medicines.

I’ll listen to music or podcasts on my walk to work. When I arrive I make sure to do as much admin (such as replying to emails) as I can to get it all out of the way.

I will have had any sample I want to look at under the microscope prepared on the previous day as my samples are in a vacuum and cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures. I will then scan samples to see nanoscale objects and try and do various things depending on my experiments. Some of these things have included:

Writing on the surface by removing atoms, moving molecules around into new structures, and seeing what will cause large changes in the arrangement of a surface.

As the day draws to a close I have to prepare my work for the next day as I might want to switch samples and it can take overnight for them to cool down to -200 degrees