Profile

I teach physical chemistry at the University of Glasgow, where I also have a research group.  My group works on nanoparticles and materials that contain nanoparticles.  To give you an idea of the sizes we’re talking about,  a nanometer is one billionth of a meter – or around 10 atoms wide!  The reason that we are so interested in these very small particles is because when you break materials down to such very small sizes, sometimes they have unexpected properties.  For example, you might see jewelery, like a necklace, made of gold and you can see that it is shiny, bright and yellow-ish in colour.  Now imagine if you could break that necklace up into very tiny pieces, only several atoms across.  What happens when you have gold particles that are so small that we can call them nanoparticles is that they take on a new color – they actually appear red in color.  They take on these new optical properties and, depending on their size and shape, they can behave differently.  If we want to make gold nanoparticles in a lab though, we don’t have to ruin our favorite jewelery.  Instead, we can produce these kinds of particles using solution chemistry.  This is the kind of work that my students and I do.  We are trying to find new ways to make all kinds of nanoparticles – from particles that are magnetic and can be used in medicine for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases to particles that can be used in batteries to charge and discharge your mobile phone.  At the moment, we are using microwaves to try to make nanoparticles.  We want to be able to control the shape and the size of our particles, so we work hard at finding the best conditions for our experiments.  To find out if we have been successful, we use lots of methods to characterise our particles.  One way we do this is to use X-rays to see how the atoms are arranged in our particles and helps us to identify what kind of material we have made.  We can also use electron microscopes, which have very high resolution, and allow us to take images of individual nanoparticles, so we can check what size and shape our particles are.  Having all of this information allows so to begin to understand why our materials behave in the way they do.

My work has lots of different aspects to it.  On some days, I am lecturing to students who are studying as undergraduates at the university for their degrees in Chemistry.  One of the courses I teach is thermodynamics, which is the study of energy changes that can occur during some chemical or physical transformation.  I also get to teach in the undergraduate laboratory, where our students carry out their own experiments, take careful measurements with different pieces of scientific equipment and explain their results in reports.

Another part of my work is running my research group.  Our research is on making and studying nanoparticles, so my lab in Glasgow has lots of equipment that we can use for synthesis.  For example, we use specialised glassware that can keep air and moisture away from our reactions since some of the reactions we do are sensitive to oxidation by moisture or air (oxidation is loss of electrons and this can affect what kind of material we end up with).  We also use furnaces, which can heat up materials as high as 1000 degrees – sometimes we need to do this to make our reactions work.  We also use microwave reactors – the same idea as your microwave at home, except it is specially designed for chemical reactions to give us more control over pressures and temperatures.  So, sometimes during my day, I might be in the laboratory making some materials or speaking to my students about some interesting results they might have.  That is really one of the best parts of my work – when we really have to figure out what is happening in a particular reaction or trying to work out what our results truly mean.  When all the pieces fit together, it is a great feeling.

I also get to travel a lot with my work.  For example, last weekend I was at the ISIS Neutron and Muon facility, close to Oxford.  I was there to carry out some experiments on some nanoparticles my student and I made in our lab.  ISIS is a very exciting place to be – it is where a lot of experiments are done by scientists who want to study their materials on an atomic level.  We can do this at ISIS because it produces beams of neutrons and muons that can tell you a lot about where atoms are in your sample and what they are doing.  Here is an example of one of the experiments my group have done:

http://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/science/energy/nanoparticles-small-but-mighty13485.html