Profile

I am currently living with my boyfriend in Sheffield, we moved in together for the first time at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, having met in Switzerland 8 years ago when we were in our undergraduate degrees at different universities.

At the weekends, I keep fit by doing lots of walking in the Peak District or swimming. I grew up in the Peak District and spent my childhood walking and cycling in the countryside.

I love reading and drawing/painting. Most recently I have been upcycling furniture in my house, however I prefer to paint art pictures to decorate my home. My favourite artists are Van Gogh, Salvador Dali and Leonid Afremov.

I have an awesome collection of boardgames and I regularly meet with friends to play boardgames in board game cafes. My favourite game is currently Cubitos, which is a dice rolling game to move around a racetrack. Most evening after work I like to relax and play computer games on my PC. I play a lot of games with friends or co-op with my partner. Most recently, I have bought the Valve Index virtual reality headset to play, which is amazingly fun!

I am a senior research chemist and most of my work is done in a lab. I spend all my time thinking about chemical molecules: about how to make them, or how to change them to make them better. The chemical molecules I work with are small structures made by linking together different atoms using bonds.

I will select a molecule that I would like to make and I use my knowledge and some resources on the internet to plan the best way to make it. Usually there are many different ways to make the same molecule, so I can choose my preferred path. Each molecule is made starting from a commercially available starting molecule, and then I add to or change parts of that starting piece to get the exact material I wanted.

I can use many different methods or techniques to make this by myself, but sometimes I need to use techniques that I am not trained at, and so I am able to talk and work with many colleagues to achieve the final molecule. Working in the chemistry department involves a lot of teamwork and there is a wonderful feeling of friendship and community.

When the molecule is made, I give it to the biologists who make a solution of the solid and spray it on the plants in the greenhouse. We wait for a couple of weeks and then we look at the plants and see how the molecule that we applied has affected the plants. We are most interested in preventing the growth of weed species. The reason for this is because, when plants are growing in a field, there is a limited amount of nutrients, sunlight, food and water for the plants. If a farmer has planted their crop, then they want their crop to get all the resources so that they can get the maximum food from that field of crop, so they don’t want weeds stealing those resources and using them instead.

I can then use the results from these plant studies to think of new “designs” of that molecule, for example, I could change one part of the molecule and then see how that change effects the plants.