Profile

Nature is the mother of all things, and evolution has managed to develop a system where it can turn light to energy; photosynthesis. My work is trying to do something similar, in using light and change this energy into a chemical bond.

Flavins are a natural molecule, found in a number of enzymes, that can be photo-excited when irradiated with light, making it highly reactive. Once it is excited the energy can be used for the system to undergo chemical reactions that would otherwise not be possible. The most common flavin is vitamin B2, which unfortunately cannot be used for this research since it is highly insoluble, meaning that it will not form a solution in common solvents.

No day is the same, and that is the reason why working in a lab is so interesting.

There are some underlying concepts that are similar, mainly the fact that the ending of most days is to set up reaction and switch on my light source, and then I spend the first part of the morning working up reactions and using spectroscopic techniques to see what is happening in my reactions.

The afternoon is normally used to read articles and come up with brilliant ideas to try the ext day while I also use this time to build some rigs up, mainly different lightning sources to try out for my reactions.