Profile

I’m a 37 year old father of two children and two dogs (and a tortoise), married to my nurse wife. Because she works lots of strange shifts I spend a lot of time looking after things at home but when I can get away I like to go for long bike rides, and I once cycled back from Barcelona to Manchester to raise money for the Children’s Hospital. I’ve lived in Manchester since I came as a student in 2004, and I love this city even if it rains most of the time. When I’m home I spend a lot of time getting beaten by my kids at Fortnite, although I’ve managed to get a few wins over the years.

Most of my research work is trying to make new materials made from uranium, but that are safer in a nuclear accident. Nuclear reactors are like big kettles, that make electricity from steam turning a turbine. That means that during an accident the nuclear fuel can be attacked by steam at very high temperatures (over 1000C!), which is enough to destroy most materials.

To protect the fuel we wrap it in a can which we call a ‘cladding’, and at the moment that’s normally made from zirconium. The problem with this is that zirconium reacts with steam and makes hydrogen, which can then explode! To replace the cladding with something better is difficult, so we’re working on that too, and making better fuels sometimes means the cladding can be better straight away as well.

To make new materials I get to use a whole range of cool technology – we have an arc melter for melting uranium (at 3000C!) lots of glove boxes for safely working with dangerous powders and very high powered microscopes for looking at how the material is put together. Sometimes if does come down to hitting things with hammers and seeing what happens though!

I wake up at 6am (thanks to my 7 year old normally) and have a coffee and breakfast. I usually take him to school and then cycle into work. At work I try and get into the lab as soon as I can, before somebody talks me into going to a meeting! Normally that means working with my hands in a glove box for a long time (those boxes with big widows on the front with gloves put into them). I need to use those to stay safe, but it gets very hot with thick gloves on over thinner gloves for a long time and it can be hard to pick up small things with the thick ones on!

I have lunch with some of my students normally, and then help them with experiments in the afternoon, probably teaching them how to use the microscopes properly or working out what material they’ve made using X-rays or lasers. I’ll finish work about 5 and go home to play Xbox with the kids.