19/02/2016

University of Manchester PhD

Position

PhD student

Date

September 2012 – October 2016

Description of role

After securing funding from the university, I started my research under the supervision of Dr Blanford and Prof. Flitsch, which was originally titled ‘Graphene bioconjugates for biotechnology applications‘. I have been based mainly in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, which is designed as an interdisciplinary centre and as such, I have gained expertise in a cross section of scientific fields rather than becoming more confined to a specific subset of science. Later in my PhD, the focus changed sufficiently to be re-titled as ‘Analysis and Metric Development for the Study of Viscoelastic Thin Films Utilising a Quartz Crystal Microbalance’. Due to this, my research to date has covered many techniques and equipment including electrochemistry, QCM, QCM-D, HPLC, MATLAB, UV-Vis, Raman, AFM, microscopy, ozonators, centrifuges and cryogenics. I have also used, albeit less frequently, vacuum evaporation, NMR, cell sorting, Schleck lines, oxygen-free glove boxes, XPS and MALDI.

Currently, my co-author and first author papers have both been published with the third paper nearing the submission stages.