Profile

I’m an American living in Leeds. In my free time, I row (single sculling usually), head to the gym, or I’m visiting my boyfriend in London. My pronouns are he/him. With the current stay-at-home, this has meant I’m mostly on my own, but I get out for bicycle rides and can get to the edge of the Yorkshire Dales on a good day.

Foods I wouldn’t live without are coffee and cheese. I enjoy going to art galleries, watching television or Netflix, travelling to places I’ve never been, and hanging out with close friends.

We use solids in everyday technologies like computers and mobile phones (from the screens down to the processors inside) as well as in how we construct buildings, the cars and buses we ride in, and in the manufacturing industries that make these products. We also rely on solids for solar cells and in processes like water treatment.

If we want to understand how and why some solids work best for these technologies, we have to understand the building blocks. Understanding building blocks then allows us to make better solid materials or to make new ones that will do their jobs even better – using less energy, lasting longer, or making new technology possible.

The building blocks are atoms and molecules. These are so small that they cannot be seen by eye or even really fancy cameras. If we use a different kind of camera and electrons instead of light, we can see individual atoms. I use special microscopes that use beams of electrons to see atoms and measure bonds. Electrons (which are usually part of atoms) are pulled out of a metal tip and sped up to about 2/3 the speed of light. A beam of this kind of electron can see atoms. I am working on new ways to use these beams to measure fundamental properties of the atomic structure, chemical bonding, and composition of solids that we cannot measure any other way.

I might usually spend part of my day on a microscope – that means setting things up (there are several steps to align electron optics and load the sample into a vacuum), taking calibration data, and running data acquisition. Acquiring data can look like a couple of different things. Sometimes it is taking lots of pictures of lots of different areas of a sample, one after the other, sometimes it is taking lots of pictures of one tiny object (a bit like running a CT scan or MRI but where my patient is a piece of dust). Another thing I do a lot is to take lots of spectra – this is looking at all of the different ‘colours’ that are present. These aren’t real colours like you see with your eyes because we are looking at a different kind of radiation, but the principle is the same. After taking a bunch of data, I then spend time writing computer code to process and analyse the data. That’s partly because most of the time I have so much data I wouldn’t be able to look at it by hand – and computer code also does the same thing very reproducibly. When I collect data on a special camera, it’s a bit like applying different image filters (not entirely different from a instagram or snapchat filter!) to pull key features out of the larger dataset. Once the data is processed, there’s finally quite a bit of time thinking about how to interpret the data and what the story is for a set of experiments (often a set of experiments includes controls and test samples and how these data compare is the story of the experiments).