Awarded the EDF/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Correlative Microscopy for Nuclear Power

I am very grateful to both EDF and the Royal Academy of Engineering for granting me a five year fellowship to allow me to spend more time on our microscopes understanding how materials change inside nuclear reactors - there is a lot of really exciting work ahead of us!

The five-year position, co-sponsored by industry partner EDF Energy, will enable me to expand my research group supporting the latest developments in materials geared towards advancing the past, present, and future of nuclear power.

It’s a real honour to be awarded this fellowship, which will be instrumental in meeting the pressing challenges posed by climate change and energy security. The UK is committed to achieving net zero by 2050, which means it must remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as it emits. Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, are a vital part of this transition but present fluctuations in supply are resulting in reliance on natural gas.

Nuclear power, which produces around the same amount of carbon as solar and wind, currently accounts for between 15% and 20% of our energy. But the existing fleet of gas-cooled nuclear reactors are coming to the end of their operational life and will all close in the coming years. For new reactor construction and exciting advanced fission and fusion designs, materials research is essential, and it’s great to be at the forefront of such important work.

I am Deputy Director of the Interface Analysis Centre (IAC) facility at the University of Bristol. The IAC facility contains a suite of advanced microscopes used by my research team to understand how components in nuclear reactors change over time. This includes a plasma-focused ion beam providing 3D analysis of how the structures in a material change at the nano and micro scale, which can predict where a component might fail. 

The materials in a nuclear reactor experience one of the most extreme environments on Earth. Gradually, over years, these components change as they are exposed to high temperatures, stresses, radiation, and corrosive environments in the reactor. We have worked in partnership with EDF for a long time to help understand how the materials in the reactor evolve during operation. Our research has helped extend the life of the gas-cooled reactor fleet by more than a decade, resulting in billions of pounds of clean electricity on the UK grid. This fellowship will allow us to grow our collaboration with EDF, providing material insights to extend the life of existing reactors safely, support the construction of new reactors, and better understand future challenges.

Awarded the Amazon Physical Science Fellowship!

I’m delighted to say that I am one of three early-career academics awarded the 2022 Amazon Physical Science Fellowship.

This was a really interesting fellowship opportunity giving applicants the opportunity to present a portfolio of scientific ideas and discoveries over the past twenty years that we believe will have dramatic and positive impact on the world.

I very much enjoyed the process of creating a portfolio of scientific ideas, dipping into areas of physics and science outside my normal area and learning lots more about the exciting science going on around the world. I hope that the efforts of the applicants will be of great benefit to the programme, and want to thank Amazon for this amazing award.

Science continues...

The last touches are being put on my two novels, and the game they tie into, Maelstrom's Edge. Much more to come on that in a few weeks time, including details of the Kindle release.

In the meantime, there's plenty of work to be done at my day job at the University of Oxford. I've had one new paper published in the last few months, in Applied Physics Letters. APL is a journal I tried (and failed) to publish in during my PhD, so it's nice to finally see something with my name on it in that prestigous journal!

The paper is using the atom probe machine that I run at Oxford to look at the distribution of indium in InGaN/GaN quantum wells. Quantum wells are one of the most significant applications of quantum mechanics used in the real world, where they are used in LEDs. Thin layers of a doped semiconductor, in this case Indium Gallium Nitride, are sandwiched between another layer (Gallium Nitride here) with a different band gap. By restricting the width of the doped layer to a few tens of nanometres, you can confine the carrier electrons or holes so that they can only release energy at a certain wavelength. This means with the right well dimensions, when you apply an electric field they will emit a specific colour of light, perfect for LEDs.

The atom probe in my lab allows us to study these materials at the atomic level, to see exactly how the layers of InGaN are distributed. In this case, we wanted to look at two different orientations of the wells, and found that in one growth plane, the Indium is very evenly distributed throughout the wells, whilst in the other direction, clustering of In occurs that can have degrade the performance of the device.

I have another more technical paper on this work due to be published in Microscopy and Microanalysis soon. I'm working on a bunch of other papers at the moment which should be submitted soon, to reduce my backlog of data from last year. Once these three papers are submitted, I can move on to working on some exciting new experiments, such as fossils and meteorites!

In other news, I was very honoured to be selected as the David Cockayne Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College starting in October this year. Belonging to an Oxford college as a fellow is a great honour and will allow me to mingle with some very distinguished colleagues as well as eat some tasty dinners!

Novel nearly done!

I've been working on it for three and a half years, but the novel I've cowritten with Stephen Gaskell, Sacrificial, is nearly done, although it's still under wraps so I can't tell anyone about it! The final proof copy went out to my beta readers last night. I'm hoping to finish any final edits in early March for release in April. Keep your eyes peeled for then!

I had another scientific publication this week, although I'm not sure I can claim much credit! Kane O'Donnell did all the hard lifting for this one. It's a summary of the computational simulations he's done on the diamond surface using various alkali metals in combination with oxygen. I did a little of this for my thesis.

I'm working on many other papers at the moment, things are really busy! I'm also helping to write some promotional videos for my friend Tom Morgan's production of Arcadia by the Southside Players in Balham this February. Should be fun!

Reading: My novel!
Watching: The Theory of Everything
Listening to: The Decemberists - What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World