Profile

Our generation faces a serious energy crisis. We are depleting our favourite form of fossil fuels (oil and gas), and are turning to ever more dirty and environmentally damaging alternatives (brown coal, tar sands). The carbon dioxide and other pollutants that burning these fuels have generated since the start of the industrial revolution have distorted the energy balance of the atmosphere and are driving a climate change that will change out entire world.

All of our Energy, except for Nuclear and Tidal, comes originally from the Sun. A vast quantity of solar power shines on the Earth, about 122 petawatts (that’s 122’000’000’000’000’000 watts). Humanity only uses about 1 / 8000th of that in total. This is much more than any other renewable energy source.

Solar power is distributed across the whole world, everyone has access to it, and you can make it where you need it.

You may have seen those blue solar panels appearing on buildings and farms near you. These are usually made from silicon.

The problem with solar power is that the current things we build to turn sunlight into electricity are expensive! If we find a cheaper way to make these sunlight converters, we can start to use a lot more solar power, and put converters on everyone’s roof at home and in every country.

There’s lots of scientists, universities and companies across the whole world who are trying different ways to do this. We’re in a massive race competing to make the cheapest and most efficient converters. Whoever wins will be famous, but most importantly we’ll have all won, in having a planet that’s more habitable for it!

The group I’m a member of is trying to make solar panels out of squishy materials that we can make in big buckets, and that don’t need the high temperatures and complicated processing that silicon does (this is what makes silicon panels expensive, they’re actually just made out of sand – silicon dioxide).

We make solar panels by mixing special plastics with electronically different molecules. We dissolve them in solvents that are a lot like petrol. Then we make the smallest pancake you could imagine, putting a drop of this material on a piece of electrically conductive glass the size of a penny, spinning at thousands of revolutions a minute.

When they start making these solar panels in big factories we hope we will be able toprint them like newspapers in a big machine with rollers!

The current materials we use to make this type of solar cell are not good enough for mass production. They’re difficult and expensive to make, and don’t like Water or Oxygen, which is not a good thing for something you want to put on your roof!

A synthetic chemist is someone who make new materials, putting together atoms in ways that no one has ever done before. What they do is amazing, but there are so many different ways of putting together atoms that if we had to wait for them to try every combination, we’d be here forever!

So this is where I come in. Instead of having to make every possible one, I use big powerful computers to calculate how I think these materials should behave according to simulations of how the electrons interact. We’re still figuring out how to do this as we go along, so I also spend a lot of time calculating how we think a material that they’ve already made should behave, and then comparing this with what it does in reality, and trying to improve our methods.

Scientists have access to big collections of computers in things called clusters. These computers are super powerful, and can work together on a really big problem or all do the same calculation on different materials.
Today’s computers are so powerful that in a single second they can easily do more calculations than you could do with a calculator in a hundred years working non stop with no sleep!

My day really varies depending what science I’m currently doing. But it almost always starts with cycling to work – to the massive Blackett laboratory at Imperial College London. It’s an enormous concrete block with thousands of physicists in it.

This is the main entrance to physics – above the doors are engraved slates showing important discoveries in modern physics with just pictures and diagrams.

Some areas of science take lots of people many years to design a single experiment, collect the data and analyse it. In the design of organic semiconductors, things move pretty quickly. Our experiments to measure the properties of new materials are fairly quick to carry out, it’s more that chemists are making so many materials and we would like to understand them all!

A lot of my time is spent sitting at my desk with my computer. One screen is usually full of technical documentation and google searches. On the other screen I’m usually logged into a computer cluster somewhere in the world. Here I tell the computers what I would like calculated, check on jobs that I set running days ago and write little bits of computer code to analyse the results and convert data from one form to another, plot the data and interpret the result. Quite a lot of time I just spend thinking, usually along the lines of: “Does this make sense?” and… “How can I check this result?”
I always try and get a visual sense of what is going on, so I spend some time making pictures of the molecules and electronic processes that are occurring.

Our labs are spread out through the whole building, so if I’m doing some experimental work I seem to find myself spending a lot of time walking! New chemicals are made in very small quantities at first (sometimes you just get a few flecks of dust!), and are extremely precious, so you walk around holding these tiny glass vials like precious eggs.

Every other week during term time I tutor undergraduate students. So I spend some time setting and marking homework, and then spending an hour long lesson talking with small groups of four in a classroom.

Scientists often give talks to one another about what they’ve been researching, and trying to understand. Lots of different types of scientist work on organic electronics at Imperial, so regularly I find myself going to different departments to hear people speak. Occasionally I give a talk to them about the latest things I’ve been looking into.

Also, very important for science is socialising and coffee. The Blackett laboratory has a fantastic coffee room, with a roof terrace eight floors above the ground. Physicists spend a lot of time in dark or dimly lit laboratories as the light interferes with our optical measurements, so it’s nice to sit outside in the sunshine!
Chatting over a drink or lunch is really useful in understanding the little things and hear what other people think may help.