Profile

I’m a full time working mum so most of my time out of work is trying to make the most of time having fun with my son and husband.

I look after 3 labs that do lots of things, and all things plastic.

Polymers (fancy word for plastic) are made from building blocks called monomers. If you zoom in close enough to see how the polymer is built, it commonly looks like spaghetti. How long that spaghetti is, how tangled the spaghetti is and what the spaghetti is made out of gives plastic there different properties – think plastic garden chair vs plastic shopping bag.

My synthesis lab is full of fumehoods and people doing chemistry to make or unmake polymers.

My instrument lab is full of lots of kit that can give me information about the properties of the polymers, like what temperature they melt, how strong the polymers are, how long the polymer chains are. I can even weather polymers at faster speeds to see when the polymers stop working as they’re meant to.

My end-of-life lab has kit in called ‘extruders’. Extruders are one of the ways that plastic is recycled when it is thrown in the recycling bin. Extruders melt and mix shredded pieces of plastic. The melted plastic flows out of the extruder in strands, cools down and is passed through a pelletiser. The pelletiser cuts the melted plastic back into small pieces. These small pieces can be re-melted to be used again.

There is a lot going on to keep a lab operating safely. The lab has chemicals, gases, kit that measures the plastics. I need to ensure that the lab space (gas supply, electrics, fumehoods, etc.) and kit inside are operating correctly. I also ensure the people inside are also working safely. Some of my job is reactive because things break, alarms go off, etc. When I’m not fire fighting, I do work to help businesses make more sustainable plastic choices and this can involve me doing experiments to test their samples.