Many chemical synthesis techniques used in industry to create pharmaceuticals and consumer goods are extremely energy intensive and produce large amounts of toxic by-products. What if we could utilise light, a limitless energy supply from our sun, to activate these chemical reactions on-demand in order to limit our energy consumption and produce less waste as […]
Cells are the building blocks of all living things. Contained within the cell membrane is all the machinery and information required to sustain and create life, but a machine can’t work without materials. Cells require a constant flow of energy and nutrients across their membrane to stay alive, and this is facilitated by nanoscopic pores […]
The interfaces between electronics and living organisms (known as Bioelectronics) enables monitoring and stimulation of biological processes. These can range from leveraging bio-electrochemical pathways in microbial organisms for energy conversion to developing diagnostics and physiological assays for therapeutics. I am interested in investigating bioelectronic interactions at the cellular level. For my work in the Knowles […]
Electrical devices can be turned on and off through a simple flick off a switch. But what if we wanted to turn chemical molecules on and off like a switch. This is possible using light in what is known as photoswitches. These are molecules that are able to undergo a reversible transformation via irradiation of […]
Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. It led him to conclude that human-caused CO2 emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to […]
In the ancient days, human beings were happy with the Hellenistic models of astronomy. As more accurate observations on planetary motion were done by Tycho Brahe, more sophisticate theories were correspondingly brought about by the likes of Kepler and Newton. Then as Einstein came up with more elegant theories of relativity, more precise observations by […]
Microchips surround us, from your smartphone, to medical sensors, credit cards and your fridge, data is continuously recorded and conditioned to steer our daily lives. Many of these devices have stringent power budgets and one cannot arbitrarily increase computing power. Moving and manipulating data is an energy intensive process, therefore novel concepts need to be […]
Arguably, the defining technology of the last century has been the computer. Over the last few decades computers have been integrated in every single part of our lives. Whether it be calling your parents, shopping at the supermarket or even waking up in the morning, computer keep track of almost everything we do and help […]
When someone asks you to think of a laboratory, you might imagine a large room with lots of equipment and people in lab coats. This has been the way things worked for centuries. Now a days, we have the technology to shrink everything that would normally go in a lab to fit in the palm […]
The electricity you use to charge your phone is a flow of electrons that contain electric charge. Designing circuits that utilise this charge and how it behaves within materials like semiconductors is a field known as electronics. Electrons and other particles also have another property known as spin. The field of study associated with utilising […]