Profile

I live at home with my mum, aunt, older brother, younger sister and my wee dog Pepper! I love listening to and playing music, particularly blues, country and a little bit of rock thrown in and I also quite enjoy cooking. My favourite TV shows are Friends, Orphan Black and I am quite the fan of Stranger Things on Netflix! I’m also a huuuuuge Harry Potter fan and have read all of the books more times than I can count…and seen the films even more!

One of my favourite things to do is travel and I spent last summer travelling around Italy with my partner. We started at the north, ended in the south west and ate far too much pizza. Next summer we plan to do the North Coast 500 roadtrip and I’m sure we’ll see some amazing sights along the way!

My area of research is a branch of inorganic chemistry known as Organometallic chemistry. I work with a few different metals namely, gallium, magnesium, sodium and sometimes lithium, to try and succesfully carry out reactions that are normally done using very expensive metals such as palladium and rhodium. The benefit of the metals that I use is that they are much cheaper than the popular transition metal ones that are currently in use, and they are also much more abundant! The first year of my PhD has mainly focussed on using a gallium compound alongside a non-metal compound to attach a small boron fragment onto different aldehydes and ketones – this process is known as hydroboration! I am now looking into activating carbon-fluorine bonds using some exciting magnesium compounds. This is a very imporant topic of research as carbon-fluorine bonds are extremely prominent in medicinal chemistry!

But first, coffee!
I typically wake up aroun 6.30am and make coffee before getting myself ready for the day. I then leave the house around 7.30am so that I can be in the office for 8am! I like to get into the office a bit early so as to download my data from the day before, look at new research papers and sort myself out for the work ahead. I usually start my experiments at about 9 o’clock and like to be in the lab all morning. The chemistry that I do is air sensitive and so I have to use special apparatus called a Schlenk line which I have attached a picture of below! I also prepare all of my reactions in a Glove box (also a picture below) which is basically just a big chamber filled with inert, argon gas that allows me to handle air and moisture sensitive compounds easily. As these compounds can be flammable, it is important to be very careful and always have at least one buddy in the lab!
I stop for lunch around midday and check that I am on schedule. I then usually finish putting on the rest of my reactions and like to analyse my data as I go! I like to spend an hour or so every day taking care of older reactions, making sure they are good and then analysing them if I need to! Then, more coffee…
I finish my day by washing my glassware, planning reactions for the next day and tend to leave the office around 6.30/7pm. Then I head home for dinner and repeat it all again the next day!