PEOPLE

Research Summary:

My research involves understanding problems in materials science using electronic structure and atomistic computer simulations.

There are a global effort to find means to generate energy cheaply and on a large scale without doing further damage to our environment. I am involved in three activities associated with this: working with experts on hydrogen fusion at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy to find materials that can withstand the brutal environment in the neighbourhood of the plasma in which the fusion reactions take place; working with colleagues to optimise the recycling process for Al that could save large amounts of energy and reduce carbon emission; collaborating to develop robust modelling methods that can manage the complexities of organic photovoltaics.

Olfaction (smell) is familiar to us all, but poorly understood. I am working to understand how human noses identify chemical species (probably by detecting molecular vibrations), and to turn our discoveries into electronic devices.

A new departure for me is to study plasmons in small pieces of metal that can be used as waveguides and to build sensitive detectors of vibrational spectra.

Keywords:

Crystal Growth, Non-Adiabatic Processes, Solidification, Gas Sensing, Photovoltaics, Plasmonics, Radiation Damage, Correlated Electron-Ion Dyn, CONQUEST, Gas Sensing, Photovoltaics, Plasmonics, Radiation Damage, Correlated Electron-Ion Dyn

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