Personal Profile
Name: Lucy Moorcraft
Age: 26
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
Job: Post-graduate student
University: University of Edinburgh
Education:
Dual Award Science GCSE, Chemistry, Geology and Maths A levels
Chemistry with Industrial Experience degree at University of Bristol
Now in 3rd year of PhD in Edinburgh
Date: 14/06/07
Time: 12noon
Location: work
Title: My day in the EPR room.
My name is Lucy and I am studying for a PhD in Chemistry at the
University of Edinburgh. A PhD is what you can do after you have
finished your first university degree and involves doing lots of new
research that no-one else has done before. It is hard work but can be
lots of fun too.
Edinburgh is very cold and cloudy today, but i couldn't stay in bed all
day and I got to work at 9am. I don't normally get up as early as this
but i had a meeting to go to. I can usually come into work whenever I
want, as long as i get some work done while i'm here. Now I'm going to
tell you what some of my work is.
I make molecules that can be used in solar cells to turn sunlight into
electricity. I’m sure you have all heard about the greenhouse effect
and climate change, well hopefully these solar cells can eventually
help to fix this problem.
Today I am doing an EPR experiment. EPR stands for Electron Paramagnetic Resonance….this is a very fancy chemistry name for a simple experiment. All I do is put an extra electron onto my molecule and find out where it goes. This information can then be used to tell me lots of other things about my molecule.
The experiment itself is fun to do. First of all, I have to fill up a big container with very cold liquid nitrogen because my experiment has to be done at -40 ºC. Then I have to turn on a huge magnet. Because it is so big it gets very hot so we also have to turn a water tap on. This makes lots of gurgling noises all day, so it is very hard to sit in the same room when you need to go to the toilet!
Once I have added the extra electron onto my molecule I can start collecting results. I use a machine which is over 30 years old and looks like something on all the old science fiction movies from the 70’s. It draws a big pattern onto some paper like the Spirograph I used to have when I was a kid. This pattern can then be analysed to find out where my electron has gone. Sometimes the electron might decide to stay near a nitrogen atom in my molecule, and other times it might decide to go nearer to a carbon or an oxygen atom. This is all valuable information.
At the moment, I am waiting to see if my experiment is going to work. Research science is often unpredictable. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t work. However, life would not be so much fun if you always knew what was going to happen. If this doesn’t work, I might have another go tomorrow, or I might do a different experiment instead.
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