Profile

I am interested in using new scientific technologies to make our culture more sustainable.

All the time, people are discovering new medicines to help a growing and aging population (there are now 7 billion people in the world…). But actually making these medicines is expensive and can be harmful to the environment. I’m interested in using ‘green chemistry’ to tackle this problem.

Enzymes (complicated protein molecules which make chemical reactions go faster) are a great example of green chemistry – they’re cheap, efficient and don’t make toxic waste. In the future we’d like to use enzymes for more processes in the chemical industry – it is just up to us researchers to help discover them!

My research covers lots of different areas. It’s a mixture of chemistry, biology and computer modelling, I never end up doing the same thing for more than a few weeks at a time –  although I am pretty much always wearing my lab coat and specs!

Chemistry: Planning, setting up and analysing reactions to make (or at least try to!) new compounds.

Biology: Using bacteria to make the proteins I am interested in.

Then see what the enzymes do to the compounds I have made 🙂

Computer modelling: Using software to model what is happening inside the enzyme – how does it work and which bits of the protein molecule are important. How could we change the protein to make it better at doing chemical reactions?