Science

A brief overview of my scientific career

A photograph of 165 fragments of plastic removed from a seabird's stomach. The pieces of plastic vary dramatically in size, shape, and colour.

Environmental Science

I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London, where I am studying the impact of marine plastic pollution on seabirds, specifically the flesh footed shearwater Ardenna carneipes.

My research focuses on measuring the different properties of plastic fragments removed from seabirds’ stomachs, in order to better understand how the plastic is harming seabirds. We hope that by identifying the most harmful aspects of plastic, we can change how we make and use them to reduce the impact on wildlife.

A selfie taken by the Perseverance rover on Mars, showing the top of the rover's chassis, the rover's 'head' (a box with a circular camera eye on top of a vertical mount) and its front wheels. To the left of the rover is a small helicopter drone with 4 legs and two sets of wings, sitting on the dark brown sand. The background shows brown sand and rocks going all the way to the distant crater wall, above which is a featureless, tan-coloured sky.

Planetary Science

I spent 4 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he worked on the Perseverance Mars rover mission. His job focused on calibrating and operating SHERLOC, a Raman spectrometer and science instrument mounted on Perseverance‘s robotic arm.

On the 19th of February 2021, the rover landed safely in Jezero Crater and began its multi-year exploration mission. Since then, I’ve helped the team plan surface operations for the rover, analyse data collected by SHERLOC, and report findings to the scientific community.

A scientific diagram comprised of 4 square frames, each depicting a mixture of wiggly red lines and blue dots. The left-most square shows primarily red lines, some of which form groups of parallel lines, while the right-most square is mainly blue dots, some of which form groups of neatly packed dots.

Plastic Electronics

I did my PhD at Imperial College London, where I studied organic photovoltaics (OPVs), a new generation of solar panels based on cheap, printable organic materials.

My PhD focused on understanding how these new materials behave at the molecular level, and how this behaviour impacts their performance and stability in solar panels.

A scientific illustration showing a 3D model of purple-coloured lithium atoms arranged inside a hexagonal lattice of grey-coloured carbon atoms. Normally the lithium atoms sit in the middle of a hexagon, but in the middle of the lattice a carbon atom is missing, leaving behind a larger hole that has a lithium atom at its centre.

Chemistry

I started my career in science at Sussex University, where he completed an undergraduate Masters degree in chemistry, later specialising in physical and theoretical chemistry.

My Masters dissertation was on theoretical chemistry, studying the diffusion pathways of lithium ions inside graphite lattices used as cathodes in lithium batteries.