Question: What inspired you to be a Crystallographer and how did you hear about it?

Andrew Cairns answered on 16 Nov 2011:

An old professor at Oxford helped me with an experiment in my undergraduate course, and that really inspired me to get involved with crystallography. He explained everything, showed us pictures and let us use really expensive pieces of equipement – these things don’t always happen in experiments at undergraduate!

Then I found out my current supervisor was starting a group in Oxford. We use crystallography as a major tool in the search of new materials, which really excited me. We also use other techniques, and always like to have a full story when we write up an experiment!

We are also moving on to more challenging crystallography questions, like if it is possible to extract a structure from amorphous materials (those without any long-range order, like a bucket of lego bricks not assembled).