Profile

I live in Bournville neighbouring the chocolate factory! I am a scientist working at the University of Birmingham as a senior lecturer. I teach organic chemistry and lead a research team that probes aspects of catalysis and sensing. I am fortunate enough to travel with my work and have friends all over the world.

I am married with three children, all at primary school. I enjoy cycling and go by bike to work along a canal, and am often surprised by the wildlife en route.

I enjoy cooking, and see many parallels between the kitchen and the laboratory. The best aspects are developing my own protocols (recipes) and creating something unique. In both science and cooking the quality and cleanliness of your apparatus is important, and in both cases tidying up after yourself is the most boring part.

“Making fun stuff that does cool things”

I find the discovery of new molecules and novel ways to make them the most interesting and rewarding challenge of the chemical sciences. I am driven by a desire to understand how molecules interact with each other, and use that understanding to achieve previously unattainable goals. Its great when the molecules we make have real-life practical applications, such as in healthcare, but the primary reason to try and make news things is to see if we can. If it was easy it would not be fun.

In the area of catalysis, our work revolves around making new catalysts, or new molecular tools. We are the tool makers, and we hope our tools inspire others to create things we could never have imagined. Think about the inventor of metal rivets, the inventors could not have envisaged their use in the constriction of the Eiffel Tower or holding aeroplanes together. Without new molecular assembly tools it will be difficult to imagine how drugs to combat emerging diseases will be prepared in a cost effective way.

After breakfast with my family, I usually cycle to work along a peaceful stretch of canal, giving a few mins of quiet time for thinking and planning the day. When I get to my office I have go through emails and messages from a wide range of collaborators, global research projects means “office hours” is a thing of the past. Time zone management is really helped by shared online calendars. Most days I will talk by Skype or FaceTime to collaborators in Asia, Europe or North America, and I am interested to make contacts with more scientists in Africa and South America. My research team usually present me with recent results and we discuss any problems. During term time I might teach a class but teaching is not my main activity at present. Science requires resources (money) and much of my time is devoted to securing resources so that my team can carry out research, this means collating ideas and hypotheses and presenting those, usually in writing, to agencies that support science, it s bit like writing a Dragon’s Den pitch. I will also spend time collating results for publication. We share our results with the scientific and wider community through publications in peer reviewed journals. Conveying our ideas and findings in an accessible way can be tricky. I also spend time refereeing papers and funding applications, this means offering opinions (confidentially) on the scientific results and ideas of others in my field.

On a good day I will have seen research results from my team that I would not have expected at the start of it, I will have had time to eat lunch and conversed with leading scientists about unanswered questions of science.

When I get home, usually late,  I like to have a rest and switch off for a little. After dinner, and the kids have gone to bed, I usually end up double (or triple) screening, binge-watching watching online services like Netflix, iPlayer and Amazon or listening to comedy, science or electronic music podcasts whilst checking emails, instant messaging collaborators and writing papers. Work-life-balance is a phrase I dislike, perhaps admin-life-balance is what could be addressed. A musician does not stop enjoying music at 5pm and a scientist (who might also be a musician) does not stop trying to solve research problems when the sun goes down. As long as I enjoy research it does not feel like a job and I will take every opportunity to learn new things and find out the answers to the questions I am fortunate enough to set myself.