Profile

I live with my daughter in a small town in the middle of the UK.  My favourite foods is peanut butter with banana toasted sandwiches.

I love Star Wars and the Marvel Universe. My favourite kids books are the ‘Spy Dog’ series, as they make me laugh. I learnt to play trumpet in Junior school and am learning to play the guitar.

My pronouns are she/her.

The machines I use can tell us a lot about many materials. I do not make the materials, so I work with other people who do. If things move while I try to see them the pictures will be fuzzy. Also the material could get stuck in the pipes and break the machine. I freeze the materials to stop this. Other people look at things that do not need freezing. There is not much room inside the machines. I use a single drop, or small piece the size of your little fingernail.

One of the machines bashes the top of the material. Bits fly off and I look at how heavy these bits, or fragments are. It is called a mass spectrometer. An example is that I used this to find out why a new battery worked once, then stopped. I looked at one battery that had not been used and also one that had. The battery was made of layers. We found these were mixed up when the battery was used. This stopped it from re-charging. Here is a picture of the machine that I used.

This is the mass spectrometer.

One of the other machines lets us see what really tiny things look like. It is called an electron microscope. We can see things that are 1000 times smaller than the edge of a piece of paper, or smaller! I used this to answer a question about a liquid medicine. It looks like runny yellow calpol and can be used to treat cancer, but it costs a lot of money to make. Chemists think they found a better way to make these very tiny liquid drugs.  They needed to check the new way worked well. To do this I froze one tiny drop of the drug and used the microscope to see it. Then I froze one drop of the drug made in the new way and looked at this too. They both looked the same. This told us our new way of making the drug was good and worked well. Here is a picture of me with my favourite microscope and an image of the drugs, which are the circles.

Sometimes I just see lots of ice and this is very annoying. Then I have to start again and repeat everything. Science does not always work first time and sometimes it does not give us the answers we would like.

No two days are the same. My week is split between microscopy and analysis, and I sometimes have to prepare samples, design parts to hold samples, write risk assessments or teach students.

Usually in the morning I will prepare the samples and I handle a lot of liquid nitrogen which is at -196 °C, much colder than your freezer at home. To protect my hands and face I wear special gloves and a face visor, and I wear a laboratory coat too. I may use a freezer to prepare the sample, if it is small enough: samples have to fit into a 3mm disc. It is nearly as tall as me and is very noisy when it is freezing things. When they are frozen I have to keep them under liquid nitrogen to move them and keep them very cold while inside the machines. You can see the ice on the rim of the metal container on the plastic jug, which has very cold liquid nitrogen in. I use a lamp so that I can see better. The blue container is a flask filled with liquid nitrogen that I can put the samples into if the machine is not ready.

When I am doing microscopy I will spend a lot of time making sure it is set up properly One of the machines is new and is one of two anywhere in the world, so we are having to work out how to do things a lot!