Profile

I was born in Chicago and raised and educated in the midwestern USA. After I finished my PhD in the US, I got offered a job for a year in Oxford. It sounded cool, so I went. Well, one year turned into three, then six, and now it’s over 15.

I love cooking and I do most of the cooking at home. My mother’s parents were Italian, so I do a lot of that; my dad’s parents do a lot of Southern USA cooking, so I do that too. I love barbecue.

I live in south Manchester with my partner, Rachel, who is a biochemist. I don’t have a pet yet, but I saw a degu the other day and now I want one.

I work at the University of Manchester in the School of Materials. I run a research group of about 6–10 people, depending on the time of the year. We meet pretty regularly so they can tell me how their experiments are going and we can think of what to do next.

I teach university students, too. I try to make lectures more interesting by letting people use their phones and having demonstrations that make fire.

I have to spend a lot of time writing. We share our exciting scientific results by writing papers about them, then having them examined by other experts to make sure they agree with our ideas and how we tested them. This takes a lot of time, but it’s really important.

Every day is different for me. That’s part of what I enjoy. There’s travel, teaching, meeting, writing, planning experiments, discussing ideas, and drinking a lot of tea.