Profile

I’m originally from Portsmouth and when I was younger I didn’t think I’d become a scientist. I don’t have any scientists in my immediate family and I didn’t realise that there were so many types of jobs in science and so many things you could work on. I wanted to be a vet until I was 14 – then I realised it wasn’t the job for me. I found chemistry really interesting at school and I knew that if you had a science degree it made getting a job quite easy.

When I was at University I realised I wanted to do research and have a job discovering new aspects of science. I care very much about the environment and I love science because by understanding the world it allows us to create new technologies that can improve people’s lives.

I now live and work in Oxford, I like it a lot because it’s a very pretty city and there’s lots of parks and things to do (although I’ve spent the whole year at home pretty much). I’m very lucky because the people I work with are the nicest most fun people and we spend a lot of time together outside of work and everyone cares about each other.

I work a lot but I also really like having time off. I like doing exercise and before the pandemic I would go to the gym a lot – my goal is to be able to do a pull up but it’s really difficult 🙁

I love TV and movies, I’ve been watching lots of documentaries recently. I love video games, I got a nintendo switch this year and am playing mario odyssey at the moment. My favourite video games are the zelda series, they’re just incredible.

I do a lot of knitting and reading too. Before the pandemic I would spend time with my friends a lot – we all like going dancing and going out to eat but we can’t do that anymore. Now we spend a lot of time video calling each other and making sure we don’t all get too bored/lonely/sad in the lockdown.

During my chemistry degree I had a course on solar energy. The environment is really important to me and I’m very worried about climate change so I wanted to learn about sources fo renewable energy. I think solar panels are incredible – we can literally turn sunlight into electricity. Sunlight is free and most places in the world experience enough sunlight that solar panels can work there.

My research is all about developing new types of materials which can either improve existing solar panels or be used as another type of solar panel. The materials I work on are called metal halide perovskites and they can be combined with existing solar panel technology to make panels which convert sunlight to electricity better. This is important because this means that in the long run it’s cheaper for people to have solar panels on their houses/buildings as you get more electricity out of them.

I work in this building – the Clarendon Laboratory. Lots of famous discoveries in Physics were made here and there are lots of great scientists doing awesome work here.

This is the group of people I work with – we all work on metal halide perovskites. As it’s a new area of physics there are lots of things about these materials we don’t know. People in my group are from all over the world – Japan, China, South Korea, U.S., Australia and all over Europe.

I spend a lot of my time working in something called a glovebox. This box is full of nitrogen to keep air and moisture out – our materials can stop working if they are made in air.

Everytime someone visits our lab they want to put their hands in the gloves. It’s really difficult to get in the gloves because you have to fight against the nitrogen in the box. Luckily we have a valve which lets some of the gas out when you go in but it’s still hard to get in. Working in here is basically like wearing two pairs of washing up gloves and trying to do something really fiddly. You also get really hot very quickly so I always try to be as quick as possible.

There are lots of types of metal halide perovskites and they do different things and have different colours. I work on ones which are yellow/brown and they look like this:

The picture on the left is of some mini solar panels. They’re about 3cm x 3cm, we make them small becuase it’s quicker than making big ones and also we never know if what we’re doing will work so it saves money and materials.

Some of the other scientists in our group work on perovskites with more exciting colours:

Some of them glow and give off light when they have electricity put through them. These ones won’t be used in solar panels but can be used to make light emitting diodes (LEDs). These are the light sources used in phones and TVs and computer screens and maybe you have lightbulbs at home which are LED bulbs. This is basically the opposite of a solar panel, instead of light in and electricity out we put electricity in and get light out.

We don’t just make these materials and try and make better solar panels/LEDs. Our work is all about trying to understand how these materials can convert sunlight into electricity. There’s lots of chemistry and physics we don’t know about these materials – they work differently from other materials like the silicon in solar panels you see on buildings/houses.

I think our research is really exciting because not only do we get to learn more about how things work but it feels like one day our research might be able to make a difference and improve people’s lives and that’s my favourite bit about science.

7:30 – wake up and drink at least two cups of tea and have breakfast. Then I get ready for the day, if I’m in work I wear practical clothes that i won’t get too hot in. We have to wear big white suits in the lab for safety which get very hot so I tend to wear layers I can take off.

This is what we have to look like in the lab.

(we are only allowed into work half of the week at the moment so my week varies)

9:00 – walk to work or sit down at my computer

If I’m not in the lab I will spend my day reading about science, planning my experiments, having meetings with my group members/other scientists around the world. These days aren’t as fun as lab days.

Below is my typical lab day

9:30 – get to work, go to the lab and get dressed up.

9:40 – 12:00: I always start by putting some music on in the lab and downloading the document in which i planned my experiments. When I’m not in the lab I look over my results and plan my future experiments.

First step is always weighing out chemicals. This can take quite a while depending on what my plans are. We make our perovskites by mixing our chemicals together in some liquids. You can buy chemicals from various companies and we use them to make our perovskites.

My chemicals look like this before I mix them together. Generally I make small changes to the chemistry and see how it changes my material and how that then affects the solar panel performance.

Once I’ve done my weighing I then clean my glass. Our solar panels are made on glass which is coated with a conductive layer. When you’re making solar panels it’s very important that everything is very clean. Even dust which you can’t see with your eye can affect how your panels work.

12:00-13:00 LUNCH – I am a person who always has to eat at a certain time. I get super hungry otherwise and working in a lab makes me weirdly hungry.

13:00-16:00: Now I start making my perovskite layers and the solar panels.

To do this we use a machine called a spincoater

Not the greatest video but this is the spincoater. We put our glass on the part that spins (called the chuck) and then we put our solution of our perovskite on it. The chuck then spins round really fast and the liquid evaporates off and we are left with a thin film of our perovskite.

16:00 – 17:30 – this really depends on exactly what experiment I’m doing. If I am making solar panels then I can test them but sometimes I don’t make full solar panels. Sometimes I want to look at other things – what the surface of my films looks like for instance. To do this I can use a microscope. There are many different types of microscope and they all tell us different things about our material.

The measurement I do most often uses a scanning electron microscope. This allows us to look at the surface of a material on a really really small scale. It’s around 1/100 the width of a human hair – you can’t see that small with your eyes.

Here is a video of me using this microscope – sorry about the quality but you can see me zooming in on my samples.

Lots of different types of scientists use these microscopes. Biologists can use them to look at cells and bacteria for instance.

17:30 – I tend to head home around now. Sometimes the timeline changes based on what i want to do but I don’t like to get home very late as I like to cook a nice meal and do some relaxing before bed.