Profile

I am a synthetic polymer chemist.  This means that I work in a laboratory and make polymers from the monomer starting materials. I am sponsored by an industrial company, this means that I work with them on every aspect of the project and they provide the funding.  We have regular meetings where we talk about the work I’ve been doing, the work I plan to do and discuss any new ideas that we have.  It is important to keep up to date with the current research that other scientists are doing so I look in scientific journals on the internet and read what kinds of things are being done.  This can often give you ideas for your own research project, which is very useful.  I look at using different monomers and different polymer forming reactions to produce new polymer materials.  These polymer materials will hopefully have interesting and useful properties and could be used in products such as shampoo,  medicines or even ink for printers.

I get into the office at 9 am Monday to Friday and sometimes at weekends too if I have lots of work that needs doing.  I have a desk in an office that is shared with other PhD students and this is where we do data analysis and general computer based work like writing reports, presentations and preparing posters.  I spend most of my day in the lab doing lots of different reactions.  Before you put on a reaction, you often need to purify your starting materials and collect the glassware you will need.  Once I have done this, I can then put my reaction on.  Many of my reactions are sensitive to moisture in the air and so I have to do the reactions in nitrogen.  This sometimes makes it a little fiddly!  When the reactions have finished, I then purify the product and analyse the pure product using techniques like nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, infrared (IR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry and size-exclusion chromatography (SEC).  Using these techniques together you build up evidence that you have made what you wanted to make and then you can test the different properties of the polymers.