Paul Scherrer Institute
Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023 onwards
Since 2023, I have been based at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, working with Dr Hubertus Luetkens in the Bulk µSR group. As well as continuing my own research into various different magnetic systems, I am also supporting users on two of our muon-spin spectroscopy instruments, GPS and FLAME. This has given me significant expertise in lots of areas such as operating and maintaining the instruments and cryostats, which include a dilution refrigerator. One of my most unique contributions to the group is the ability to calculate the muon stopping sites in materials, which allows us to gain a greater understanding of our experimental results than ever before.
As well as working with other members of the group here, I am also developing my own research programme. If you would like to collaborate, then please do not hesitate to get in touch!
Royal Holloway, University of London
Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2021-2023
As a postdoc, I worked with Professor Jon Goff in the Physics Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Here, as part of a wider collaboration with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, we focused on explaining the structural and magnetic propoerties of materials with structrual disorder. Whilst such defects are often seen as a nuisance that prevent the material behaving as we would like, it is hoped that by controlling this disorder we can actually engineer magnets to have more useful properties. Of particular interest were spin ice and spin liquid materials.
My most significant work as part of this position was the development of a way to simply explain diffuse scattering measurements through density functional theory calculations. The combination of these techniques has allowed us to understand the defect structures in various materials, which means we can explain, and hopefully tailor, the magnetic behaviour.
My work was awarded the UK Neutron and Muon Science and User Meeting Poster Prize in 2023. This prize is awarded for the best posters presented at the meeting, and gave me the opportunity to present my work to all the attendees.
Durham University
PhD, 2017-2021
My PhD was based in the Physics Department at Durham Unviersity, UK, working with Professor Tom Lancaster. Whilst there I primarily focused on muon-spin spectroscopy, which involved lots of visits to both the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, UK, and to the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, to perform the measurements. I was also responsible for looking after the magnetic and physical property measurement systems that were based in the department.
Most of the systems I worked on were topological magnets, particularly skyrmions and solitons. These are particularly interesting types of magnets, as they can both help us learn about fundamental physics, but also might have applications in future technology. My PhD was part of the UK Skyrmion Project, a collaboration between 5 universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, Southampton, Durham) to understand and develop technologies based on magnetic skyrmions. By combining muon-spin spectroscopy measurements with computational calculations such as density functional theory and micromagnetics, I was able to gain some new insights into these systems. In particular, we found that the dynamics of these systems are really interesting, with processes occuring that hadn't previously been observed.
I was very honoured to be awarded the Alan Martin Doctoral Prize in 2022 at the end of my PhD. This award is awarded to the best PhD thesis on Physics at Durham University each year.
University of Warwick
Undergraduate degree, 2013-2017
I completed my undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of Warwick in the UK between 2013 and 2017. I was lucky enough to be able to get involved in a number of research projects whilst I was there.
Final year research project: As part of my degree, in my final year I worked with Professor Tom Hase to develop methods to extract the in-plane strain profile of ultra-thin films of Ge grown on a Si substrate. We employed various different computational approaches to try and understand the complex grazing incidence x-ray diffraction data that had been measured at the Diamond Light Source.
Summer research projects: I was awarded funding to support two summer research projects. These projects were my first introduction to magnetism and research, and I am very grateful for these opportunities. The first project, working with Dr Jon Duffy, focused on using the results of density functional theory to describe magnetic Compton scattering experiments. The second project, working with Dr Paul Goddard, applied lab based magnetic and physical property measurements to various molecular magnetic systems.