20 years. 20 chemists. 20 stories. Part 2

I was the first person in my immediate family to go to university, so graduating felt like a huge achievement. I spent two years working as an analyst for the British Pharmacopoeia, and then moved to the lab next door as a forensic drugs analyst. It was really exciting – a lot of young graduates working together, analysing cannabis, cocaine and other illicit drugs. I also had to give evidence in court as an expert witness, which was quite daunting straight out of university.

I never really thought my career would take me into teaching, but I trained to be a chemistry teacher in 2011. I worked at a range of schools in London, starting with two state schools, but that didn’t really work for me, so I moved into the independent sector.

I think the lack of subject specialists, especially in state schools in the UK, is a massive concern and that does make me feel a bit guilty sometimes being in the independent sector. As a subject specialist with a background in chemistry, I’m passionate about the subject, and I love passing on that passion and enthusiasm to students.

The Covid-19 pandemic really shook everybody up. There was a lot of pressure on everyone to switch everything to online immediately. It was quite a radical change – some people feel quite protective about their classrooms, and then all of a sudden everything’s being recorded, which was quite daunting at first.

But overall, it made me more confident. Watching my lessons back, which you wouldn’t normally be able to do, gave me an opportunity for reflection on my strengths and where I could improve.

I left London because I was a little disillusioned with things after lockdown. I was feeling really burnt out, and that teachers weren’t being valued in the UK or given the time we needed to do our jobs. That’s when I moved to a British school in Brazil. It was a lifestyle change and it’s been amazing!

As I’ve moved into leadership positions, part of my role has been in mentoring other teachers, some of whom who aren’t subject specialists. In Brazil, for example, they might be subject specialists, but their training was very different – some didn’t have much experience with practicals, so might not be so confident delivering that element of the subject.

Here in the Bahamas I’m working in a brand new school, and that brings some interesting challenges – setting up new labs and a prep room in such a small island setting. I’m looking forward to seeing the department and the school develop and I am proud to be one of its founding teachers.

When you start out as a new academic, it takes a little while to work out how everything works, and what it means to run your own research group. I had moved from Belgium to Utrecht in 2000, so in 2004-5 I’d say I was coming to the end of my ‘honeymoon period’. I was still quite a young professor, but I was starting to publish my own independent work, and my first students were getting ready to defend their PhD theses. That’s a great feeling, but it’s also the time I was realising what it takes to stand on your own feet, to get funding from research funding agencies, governmental bodies and industry. So, in a way, you’re losing some of the romance and getting into the reality of academia that you have to find and create your funding opportunities.

I think, as older academicians, sometimes we need to remember what that was like; that we, too, were students and young academics once. And at the same time, it’s important for students to realise that the professors were also once students like them – it’s like a mirror.

Academic life definitely has ups and downs. There’s always been a shortage of money and opportunities – there’s always a limit. I think now there’s maybe more things that you have to do, and there’s a lot of pressure on all of our shoulders. But when you’re younger, you perhaps don’t have as much confidence yet that you can do all those things. There’s a learning curve, and we need to allow younger academics the space to go through that, to make for example mistakes. We only tend to talk publicly about our success stories, not our failures, and that’s something we should talk more about, because it’s part of how people develop. We all learn, our entire life.

I work in the field of heterogeneous catalysis, which almost inevitably means coming into contact with the fossil industry. And back in 2004, working with petrochemical companies was seen as a positive way to translate your research towards society. But now there has been a shift – both in society and in the students. There are some students who would choose not to work on a project that involves these companies, and there are others who don’t mind – if the science is interesting enough.

We’ve been developing new catalyst materials, but also using in operando spectroscopy and microscopy. 20-30 years ago, it wasn’t possible to see a single molecule or single atom while it is reacting on the surface of a catalyst. But now, to see how you can extract enormous amounts of chemistry information – that’s fantastic!

That kind of insight is important because the feedstocks for the chemicals industry are changing and diversifying. We’ve had projects looking at biomass inputs for a long time, but then about 10 years ago we started looking at CO₂, and more recently at plastic waste recycling – so we need new catalysts, but we also need to understand how those catalysts are activated and deactivated, to make more robust catalysts that last longer and don’t degrade.

Towards the end of 2003, I started my first lectureship at the University of Exeter, UK. So in 2004 I was appointing my first two PhD students, and I was really excited about the prospect of blending together synthetic chemistry and synthetic biology. I’m even more excited about that opportunity today and its power to sustainably make molecules for pharmacuticals, agrochemicals and materials. We are spinning out a company, X-Genix – that’s a whole new challenge, but it’s been an exciting adventure.

The idea for X-Genix came from our frustrations as natural product chemists and biochemists. If you want to do deep medicinal chemistry exploration around a natural product scaffold, you can be really limited by the chemical reactivity that is innate in the molecule; it’s hard to do, without going right back to the beginning of a very long total synthesis.

So we came up with the concept of an enzymatic toolbox for precision molecule editing of a complex carbon scaffold. In its first incarnation, we’re looking at aromatic and heterocyclic compounds, and we want to be able to pick a position, and directly activate and edit the molecule at that point.

We have a large portfolio of halogenase enzymes – over 10,000 in silico and about 250 in the wet laboratory. We can use those to add halogen atoms to molecules – either to directly adjust the electronic or metabolic properties of the molecule, or to provide a synthetic handle for other chemistry. And we can use molecular modelling, along with artificial intelligence and machine learning, to quickly develop the right tools to edit a given molecular scaffold.

Incubating the spin-out has involved intentionally building up an even more multidisciplinary and international team, with expertise in tissue culture, biophysics and computation, as well as excellent chemists and synthetic biologists. And I think the key thing is making sure that we can all communicate with each other and understand what the common goal is – that’s one of the things that I’ve worked hard to achieve from a very early stage in my career.

Even when it was just the synthetic chemists and the molecular biologists, I would get the synthetic chemists cloning genes, producing and purifying proteins. And then I’d have the people who had never done synthesis before come in and run some reactions, look at purification and analysis, so they could understand each other’s challenges.

The world is underpinned by chemistry and chemistry is at the heart of industry, from food to textiles to pharmaceuticals and beyond. We need to not lose sight of those fundamental skills. I was at Exeter when the university decided to close its chemistry department, in my lecture to first years on the day the department closed, I told the students that they’d made the right choice to study chemistry, that chemistry solves planet critical problems, and is foundational to global economies. Now, again, we’re seeing further UK chemistry departments facing closure. I strongly believe that we must take our opportunities to tell the world how important chemistry is, because often as a community we’re not as good as we should be at doing that.

Machine learning, automation and AI have really become mainstays of our research. Our work is sort of chemical engineering, but because of my background, we always have a very strong emphasis on chemistry. We really enjoy working with chemists, and chemists also want to know about engineering and how to use computers and machine learning to drive chemistry.

In 2004, my research group was working primarily on microsystems for chemistry, biology and materials synthesis. We did a lot of work in early versions of flow chemistry and reactions on a chip. We also used them for energy conversion devices as well as biological analysis. It was really a fun time because there were lots of problems to be solved and lots of interesting research projects. We got more and more into flow chemistry.

I was fortunate to be part of MIT’s multi-investigator programme with Novartis developing continuous processing for pharmaceuticals, which gave a tremendous boost to my flow chemistry research. That project put me in close contact with my chemistry colleagues Tim Jamison and Steve Buchwald, and subsequently, the opportunity to work with Tim and Allan Myerson on projects to realize boxes that could deliver pharmaceuticals on demand.

Collaborations work best when you bring different kinds of knowledge to the party. That way nobody steps on anyone’s toes, and everybody can focus on their strengths. Our lab’s core strengths have always been in engineering reactions, automation and devising ways to control how reagents mix and move in the system. At the moment, for example, there’s a rediscovery of electrochemistry and photochemistry – areas that have a joint interest for engineering and chemistry. They open up enormous new opportunities synthetically, but they also present engineering problems in terms of controlling how the light and electrons enter and are distributed, i.e., the design of the reactors.

Most recently, we’ve been working on autonomous lab systems. It’s something that interests many young chemists and we thought it might be very helpful to the pharmaceutical industry. We formed a consortium with our computer science and chemical engineering colleagues, focused on machine learning for pharmaceutical discovery and synthesis , and major pharmaceutical companies joined to work out how to use these tools.

These technologies have really changed how we do research. Flow lets you make materials more safely, and you can make lots of material even with small equipment. That saves graduate students a huge amount of time. Large language models allow you to extract information very quickly, so instead of having to sit and read many, many journal articles to find a small piece of useful information in each – it can done automatically. And while it’s fun to create a first set of experiments, the nth time that you run the experiment is kind of tedious. If you can automate that, it takes away the drudgery and that actually makes you focus on the research questions: ‘If I can do this, what problem should be next?’ You have more time to think and plan.

My background is in chemical reaction dynamics – fundamental studies into electron- and light-induced reactions, and the physics driving them. Back in 2004, we were looking at what might now be regarded almost as ‘toy’ systems: diatomic and triatomic molecules, and that was about the best we could do. Since then, I’ve been astounded at how far the field has come. We can now study real-world systems, and gain useful insights that the general chemistry community can take an interest in.

For example, we do experiments where we use state-of-the-art imaging techniques to measure scattering distributions of reaction products. 20 years ago we could look at one reaction product at a time in one experiment, and that was really limiting. I wanted to be able to look at larger molecules, and more complex reactions. So, together with my colleague Mark Brouard in Oxford Chemistry and others at the Rutherford Appleton Lab and in Oxford Physics, we developed the PImMS (pixel imaging mass spectrometry) camera, which lets us measure scattering distributions for all of the products of a reaction at the same time in one experiment. Over the past ten years or so the camera has been used in all sorts of different experiments, both in our labs and elsewhere.

There have been huge improvements in computational power and our ability to deal with large data sets, and routine access to ultrafast light sources has also been transformational. Femtosecond lasers, and particularly free-electron lasers, used to be really exotic things, but now they’re becoming fairly commonplace. We really can look at chemistry in real time, while a reaction is happening, in a way that was only available to a very select few back then.

Many of the processes we study involve excited electronic states, and it was really difficult in 2004 to do any kind of detailed calculations on these –you more or less had to be a hardcore theoretician to even think about it. Nowadays, pretty much every experimental group is expected either to be doing their own theory, or collaborating closely with theoreticians. Some quite advanced electronic structure techniques have even made it into undergraduate lecture courses.

More broadly, I think there are important areas of science where we still need to be able to make better measurements, or at least match the measurement capabilities to the environment that they need to be made in. As an example, together with a couple of former group members and a colleague from Oxford Materials, we’re spinning out a company that will develop environmental sensors for monitoring pollutants in rivers. There are commercially available sensors that will make individual measurements, or even make some measurements over a couple of weeks, but there isn’t really a good solution for remote monitoring of the required chemical parameters over long periods. We’re using a trick for enhancing optical measurements to reduce the sensor size and the power and reagent requirements to create sensors that will run for months at a time with no human intervention.

Moving research into a commercial environment involves a very steep learning curve initially, but it’s been really good to get wide-ranging viewpoints on our technology, and I’d love to see something from our lab actually have a real use in the outside world. Also, I’m a very keen swimmer and kayaker, so I definitely have a vested interest in getting our rivers cleaned up!

A big change in higher education is that back in 2004 teaching was typically very didactic, very teacher-centred, and lab work was also very traditional. It was a system at equilibrium and a major challenge was how to change it. I wanted to try and help crack that nut: I think ‘tried to make labs good’ is going to be on my gravestone.

20 years ago, I got my first academic position at what is now Technological University Dublin in Ireland. I set up a research programme in inorganic photocatalysis, but it was also a teaching-focused institution and some of my colleagues were very interested in chemistry education. I found that I was reading a lot more educational literature rather than bench chemistry research. So I slowly wound that down and focused solely on education research.

After the financial crash, public sector promotions in Ireland were frozen. I’d spent 10 years in Dublin and I was looking for something new. So when the University of Edinburgh approached me in 2015, I couldn’t turn it down. At that stage Edinburgh recognised there was a need for strategic leadership roles in education and I became one of six education-focused senior academics within the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

At Edinburgh, I suddenly had the freedom to work on a big problem, and because of student feedback about labs and what the literature says about labs I thought I’d work on that. Over six or seven years we really tried to rethink the lab curriculum and make labs a meaningful learning environment, where there are proper learning outcomes with good assessment protocols. We’ve really moved on from the three-hour recipe lab, which still has a place, but not it’s not the only type of lab.

That’s the headline change across higher education in all disciplines. Any teaching environment now will have some aspect of student activity, or active learning. And that ranges from using clickers for a quiz during a lecture to amazing interactive sessions.

The pandemic also made a big difference. It forced people to think about the range and scope of how we can assess students beyond the three-hour written exam. And when we had to stop lab teaching, which is part of our DNA, it prompted people to think about what we were actually trying to get out of labs. It really emphasised learning in the moment in those very precious sessions, and a lot of the skills that were often too implicit or not really baked into previous assessment formats gained a lot more traction.

There’s a big shift now to realising how labs are important to the student experience, and student satisfaction is much more a part of strategic thinking. That’s essentially the reason Edinburgh created those education roles – improving student experience. And labs are a place where lots of good things can happen in terms of the student experience, so we’re seeing department after department reconfiguring their lab curriculum. It’s becoming much more standard, which I think is a real win for chemistry.

I was a first-year undergraduate at the University of Liverpool 20 years ago. After I graduated, I stayed at Liverpool to undertake a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry, because I just wanted to continue learning and working with scientists. But after those four years, I thought, ‘This isn’t for me,’ and one of the things that made me think outside the box was actually the Royal Society of Chemistry’s campaign ‘Not all chemists wear white coats’.

I looked around at other industries and eventually decided to try nuclear. I started with a technical support role at the Sellafield site in Cumbria through their graduate scheme. I spent six years there working in various technical and strategy roles and finally as a specialist in radioactive waste management. Then I moved on to the disposal side of nuclear waste and joined the UK’s geological disposal facility programme. Finally, I decided to jump over into the supply chain side into more of a customer-facing role.

My specialist area was the disposal of wastes as a glass. We had to understand in intricate detail how the chemical components of the glass would interact with, for example, the groundwater that could enter a disposal facility. How will potassium or sodium in the water interact with and change the surface of the glass? how does the structure of the glass change when the radioactive material decays? And what impact does this have on the ability of the waste glass to contain the radioactive materials? We’re thinking about geological time scales, thousands of years. You have to build models and extrapolate – you can’t run experiments over that time frame.

A couple of things have had a huge impact on the sector in the last two decades. First, international incidents like Fukushima changed how we approach management of wastes and all the safety standards and checks of a nuclear project. And second, there has been big geopolitical shifts because of the war in Ukraine and climate change.

As a result, there is so much investment in nuclear at the moment and nuclear isn’t a dirty word anymore. We’re seeing the big data companies looking to nuclear to power their data centres. The hydrogen industry is looking to nuclear to create cleaner hydrogen. At some point, if we do make a complete transition away from fossil fuels, we’ll need a way to provide process heat to steel foundries and other industrial applications. Nuclear is one of the ways you can do that efficiently.

Unfortunately, with past incidents and a public perception of nuclear in decline, we’ve lost quite a lot of the knowledge and skills around power plants. The UK used to be one of the world leaders in nuclear technology, but because we didn’t touch nuclear for a long time, there’s a large skills gap. We have a lot of the workforce that is about to enter retirement, and while there is a really large cohort coming in, right in the middle where I sit, that’s where we’ve got a huge gap.

Nuclear in the UK is going to need so many people, and I’m really happy to see that more universities are investing in courses to educate people in nuclear. We’ll start to see a lot more of it in different parts of engineering and science. We’ve got a massive challenge ahead of us, but with challenge comes opportunity. And I think a lot of people I know in the industry are more than willing to take on those challenges.

In 2004, I was doing a PhD at the School of Textiles and Design at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. I was doing a double diploma between France and the UK, benefiting from the Erasmus scheme. I had also done a placement in Germany in hair colouration, and I was gravitating around that industry.

However, at the time there was little research in the UK in hair colouration. I would have had to go back to France or to the US. But my wife had also started working in the UK, so I stayed. I wanted to keep working in colour chemistry because it links the two things that really interest me: chemistry and aesthetics. And that’s where inkjet printing came along.

Inkjet is relatively new technology; it was invented in the 1970s, and really peaked in 2000 in terms of the desktop printer. Now, we’re looking at inkjet in industrial applications, like ceramic printing which has been a big success. So, 20 years ago the pattern on your bathroom tiles would repeat – every 10 tiles you’d see a copy because it was done with roll gravure printing. Now 99% is done by inkjet, which gives you infinity of design. Also, inkjet is non-contact, and a big problem in old tile manufacturing was that the gravure rollers would actually break the tiles.

It’s chemistry that enables inkjet to be applied in different situations – inkjet is just a way to deposit a fluid. On ceramic tile, the printer is open to the air so you need to use oil because it doesn’t evaporate until the tile is heated. The pigment is a rare earth pigment, and you need to disperse that pigment into the oil, but that’s difficult because the pigment is very dense.

Inkjet is cost efficient, but it’s not cheap compared to the traditional printing industry. But when you’re dealing with very expensive or very tricky material then it makes sense, because it only deposits very tiny amounts in a very precise and repeatable manner. So inkjet has also gone into pharma – for biosensors, antibodies – and 3D printing of organs is also being researched. If you think of graphene, a 2D material that you can build layer by layer with thin films – the possibility is immense. Again it comes back to the fluids, with chemistry at the core.

Inkjet is also very interesting technology in sustainability. We developed inkjet printing for textiles using reactive dyes invented in the 1950s at ICI – and that can cut out a lot of the water pollution associated with traditional textile dyeing. Water is a scarce resource, and dirty water is really difficult to clean. But even so, inkjet is still only a very small portion of the market.

I’ve changed from being a chemist to being an inkjet scientist, because inkjet is a comprehensive science: you need to understand chemistry, biology and physics, and you’re interacting with electronics and image processing.

We’ve not got enough thinking that way. Sustainability tells us that we need to think in a systemic way, because what you do impacts not only your customer, but the things around it, the community where you are. It’s all intertwined.

During my undergraduate, I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career - I was considering switching to medicine as a second degree. But then my tutor, Jon Dilworth, had a DPhil position on metals in medicine, shared with Véronique Gouverneur. The idea was to radiolabel copper complexes with fluorine and iodine to perform mechanistic studies on their uptake.

Jon is a very experienced coordination chemist, and Véronique has done some pioneering work in fluorination, and at the time, I felt perhaps I wasn’t doing either properly. My project was sort of in the middle, with a lot of biology and cell studies as well. But actually, that’s really set me up well for the range of radiopharmaceuticals and radiochemistry I’m dealing with now.

I moved around, working on radiolabelling using different metal complexes, fluorination and also some work on lanthanide complexes for optical microscopy. At the end of my postdoc fellowship, I still wasn’t quite sure where I was going, or whether I wanted to become an academic. And then all of a sudden, the oncology department in Oxford wanted to build a radiopharmacy to produce diagnostic imaging agents for positron emission tomography (PET), for R&D and then under good manufacturing practice (GMP) conditions.

So, in 2014, I started to build a whole PET radiopharmacy from an empty shell. This involved the clean rooms and hot cells, synthesis equipment and all the analytical quality control (QC) facilities as well. It took several years, but together with the NHS Trust we got the GMP certification and then regulatory licencing in 2019.

Then in 2020, I somewhat reluctantly decided to give up everything I’d just built to be able to join my husband in Cardiff. He had been working at a Max Planck institute in Germany, but moved to Cardiff in 2019. That’s one of the trade-offs I guess for chemists with specialised careers. I was initially head of quality control at Petic, overseeing QC and batch release of ¹⁸F-labelled agents for special clinical needs.

Radiochemistry feels a little bit hidden away – it’s not included in many undergraduate courses, for example, and it’s not very often in the press, so it can be quite difficult to get people interested in it as a career. And people might view GMP manufacturing as a bit boring as it’s the same every day. But actually, there’s quite a lot of problem solving to get these types of pharmaceuticals from ‘bench to bedside’ – you need good chemistry and analytical skills and some understanding of physics, all within the context of the regulatory requirements for pharmaceuticals and working with ionising radiation.

For somebody who likes a bit of synthesis, but also a bit of analysis and doesn’t want to do just one thing, it’s something I would encourage people to explore as a career option. The chemistry is so interesting, and it has a direct, real-world application. Because of their short half-lives, radiopharmaceuticals have to be made fresh every morning - the patients we’re manufacturing for sit in the waiting room outside the GMP area, which can be a bit stressful if things go wrong, but in general it’s incredibly rewarding!

Going back 20 years, there was a very linear approach to patents and how they were used. A lot of patent attorneys viewed obtaining the patent as an end in itself – as a sort of academic exercise. But in reality, a patent is a tool for commerce that can be used in a whole host of ways.

In 2004, I was doing a year of industrial experience at GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage. At the time, I wanted to go into pharmaceutical research – the whole ‘organic chemistry PhD then pharma’ career path. But halfway through my PhD, for various reasons I felt that route wasn’t the one to go down.

People I’d spoken to had heard that patent law was really dull and monotonous. But actually, there were articles in Chemistry World about patents and being a patent attorney, and they presented it in a completely different light. It’s a really challenging qualification process but it’s also a very fulfilling role.

People are finding more ways to use patent applications and to evolve patent law. As soon as you get into the mindset that a patent is a business tool, you realise there’s probably an endless number of ways you can use patents to support a business aim.

Maybe 20 years ago patents were considered a necessary evil, because it’s a costly endeavour if you get it wrong. Whereas now, if you’re running a start-up and you want to plan your exit in, say, 5 or 10 years’ time then you should have a strategy to build a broad intellectual property portfolio rapidly and cost efficiently because investors or buyers are going to be looking for that. That doesn’t necessarily mean patents – sometimes trade secrets are a better approach and there is a whole range of other IP types out there. If instead you’re looking at building a business yourself then you might go for more of a fortress IP model. You would claim the basic idea of your invention in a very broad way, and then you would steadily claim narrower and narrower versions of it to extend your patent protection for 30 years, let’s say, rather than the 20 years you originally had. It’s about creating something tailored to helping the business succeed – much more than just preventing copying.

Technology has also changed everything. When I joined the profession, it was letters attached to emails, wet ink signatures, and faxes to the fore. And because of that, everyone was hiding behind letters and hesitant to do things live with a client. The advent of video calls and screen sharing is a really big change – you could have phone calls before, but everyone had to prepare and find the same page, the same paragraph to follow the conversation. Now you can just write on the screen. There is no substitute for face-to-face meetings but you can intersperse those with virtual meetings and you can work on the fly with clients. They’re not wasting time and money on people perfecting long, drawn-out letters, so patent attorneys can focus on what really adds value. And it’s a much more personal experience as a result, because you get those offhand comments that can change everything, but no one would have thought to put in a letter.

It’s fascinating work and it’s endlessly challenging. I’m meeting a client tomorrow whose invention is totally astounding and could really benefit the whole of mankind. It’s great to see those real Eureka moments come through the door.