I am an IM3 senior instrument scientist for the GEM powder diffractometer within the Crystallography Group of the ISIS Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and a visiting professor in the Physics Department, Oxford University. Between 2000 and 2005 I was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow in the Clarendon Laboratory of the Physics Department, Oxford and for the eleven years prior to 2000, I was the instrument scientist for the single crystal neutron diffractometer, SXD, at the ISIS Facility.
I was President of the British Crystallographic Association (BCA) between 2012 and 2015. The BCA is the UK organisation for crystallographers which links to the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr).
The main theme of my work is to understand how local structural complexity governs a material’s physical properties. To achieve this I use a combination of X-ray and neutron total scattering (i.e. diffraction data containing both the Bragg and diffuse scattering components) and refinement of large box models using the reverse Monte Carlo method. I have applied these techniques to many different systems, initially investigating the ionic mobility in superionic materials – now a key constituent of fuel cells – and the structure of simple amorphous materials. This has been expanded over time to include, for example, studies of network silicates, negative thermal expansion materials, solid state amorphization transitions and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).