Profile

I live with my friends in Hertfordshire. I have terrible taste in music (according to all my friends) but who doesn’t love country music! I pretty much love every TV programme, i get addicted to them very quickly. My current favourite is “How to Get Away With Murder” (which concerned my fiance a tad at first!).

I think I have planned my entire future around being able to own as many dogs as possible, as life really isn’t complete without them I’ve decided.

I studied Chemistry at Loughborough University because of some amazing chemistry teachers at my school, and I only grew to love it more and more throughout my degree. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else.

I work on the concept of host-guest chemistry. This is simply the idea of using one chemical to be able to detect another chemical. It is often described as the lock and key mechanism, which chemical A will only interact with Chemical B. Using this idea I find chemicals that will only interact with the drugs of abuse that I am interested in, this way if someone goes into hospital having overdosed or is ill from something doctors should be able to very quickly determine what the drug is and treat them. Time is always of the essence in these situations, so it needs to be quick and easy!

The other half of my work is analyzing street samples to see what is actually in them! Most of the time its not what it says on the Tin!

To be honest every day is different, and that is what is so good. Some days I will spend it in the lab making new chemicals, some days I will be testing these chemicals to make sure I have made what I wanted to. I use instruments such as NMR, HPLC and Mass spectrometry to do this. Some days I just spend at my desk either reading new literature to help me learn more and give me ideas on work I could do. I also do a lot of writing as well, journals and my thesis! Other days we have street samples that need analyzing, this is always fun!