Profile

All the materials I work on are made up from transition metals (in the middle of the Periodic Table) and cyanide, an ion made up of a carbon and nitrogen bonded. You may have heard of cyanide as it is probably best known as a poison – luckily the ones I use are not quite that dangerous but we always have to be careful. The crystals made are beautifully coloured though – in the middle picture we can see a pink cobalt containing compound. I try to make the crystals as big as possible, as well as trying to make new compounds that no one else have made before. On the left we see a unit cell of the compound – the building blocks for the crystal and what we are able to see from diffraction experiments, and on the right some large colourless manganese containing crystals. The framework acts like a wine-rack or a piece of garden trellis – the hinging network shown below means that the pushing in one direction because of the pressure means the crystal has to expand in the opposite direction.

Actually making things probably takes up about a third of my time, with the rest is taken up with measuring the properties of the materials through diffraction experiments (where x-rays or neutrons ‘look inside’ the crystal) and understanding this by carrying out some spectroscopic experiments. Spectroscopy is a technique where we shine electromagnetic radiation onto a substances and measure what is absorbed – the absorbance tells us many interesting things about a system as it shows the vibrations, rotations, translations of a molecule. For our experiments I went to France to work with Julien who owns a huge number of lasers! A lot of time is also spent interpreting results and coming up with good reasons why we are seeing what we do and if it all makes sense we write scientific papers to tell the rest of the science world about our discoveries!
We work with scientists in central facilities, such as those owned by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, to do more sophisticated experiments. Last year I went to ISIS to do some high pressure experiments, the first time anyone ever had on the WISH instrument. During the first week of IAS I will be in Grenoble in France at the ESRF, so I will be able to update you on the live science going on then. 

We have no set hours in our group, so everyone has to be reasonably disciplined to make sure we do work sometimes! I usually come in late and stay late in the evenings, perhaps not how most people would choose to work but it works for me. After checking emails and usually dealing with lab problems, I can actually decide what to do in the day. 
Our supervisor, Andrew Goodwin, is almost always around although he has a whole group to keep track of! In the afternoon I will usually go into our laboratory to check on how experiments are going. If you’ve ever made copper sulfate crystals you will remember that growing them slowly means you get bigger crystals – the principle is the same in our experiments. The longest I’ve waited for something to work is about 6 months, that is a LONG time!
Some days I will be doing a specific experiment that will require me to be up much earlier and working long hours. These are organised centrally in the department and I get to work with many different people to get results. Here is a picture of one of the machines I use a lot – it has hundreds of moving parts, uses liquid nitrogen to cool the crystal and is run by three separate computers. Despite this, it is actually quite easy to use! 
 Science is actually a very sociable job – coffee breaks, lunch and dinner are often with other people in the group or the department. These are important parts of the day, not only does caffeine keep us alert, but we get to talk about what we are doing and hear what others are up to. On work days I do go out as well, depending on what everyone is up to. Below is a picture of our group Punting trip (a strange Oxford and Cambridge activity!) I live in college with other graduate students studying a range of other degrees, so it is also always good to get out of the science bubble!