Profile

I am a science researcher in the Department of Physics in UL. I work in the Solid State Pharmaceutical Centre (SSPC) to make better medicines. I call myself a computational biophysicist to sound fancy, but it just means I study how medicines will behave in the human body, and I often get help from my computer!

I love science communication and love giving talks and workshops to schools, scientists and the general public. I take part in ‘Physics Busking’, which involves doing live experiments and demonstrations for students and families at public events. I also do demonstrations at the Young Scientist Exhibition every year with the Science and Engineering department.

I love hiking, and often climb mountains, either with the charity Concern or with UL Outdoor Pursuits Club. I am a tech addict, constantly on my phone, and I also love tea way too much. While I was studying for my Applied Physics degree in UL I helped to set up a Tea Appreciation Society!

When  I come in in the morning I will grab tea and a scone and sit down to check my computer simulations. We run our simulations on the large Irish supercomputer (whose name is Fionn!) in Galway, which we can log into from our own computers. Depending on how big the molecules I am interested in are, the simulations can take 20 minutes to a week to finish.

After that I will answer any emails I have- they could be about reports I have to do on my research, science communication projects, meetings with my supervisors or other scientists, or my teaching schedule. I do up to eight hours of teaching a week, which includes helping out with labs and tutorials, as well as lecturing.

Then it’s off to the lab, to check on crystals which are growing, or to test the properties of crystals that have grown successfully. I also have to characterise my crystals to that I know as much as possible about them, I do this with a variety of microscopes, and also X-Rays.

For some crystals that I have done lots of work on already I am trying to make sensors and devices out of them. There are lots of interesting ways to do this- I can coat the crystals with thin layers of gold and connect them to little light bulbs, or I can squeeze them between large thick plates of copper. I can also coat them in thin plastics and grow lots and lots of crystal layers to increase how much electricity can be generated.

Easily Amused Physicist Takes Picture in Lift