As a first year postgraduate there are many different threads to pick up and tie off. This year has been spent heavily on the synthesis of ceramic hollow spheres in non-aqueous (no water present) emulsions. At present only titania spheres are being created but the next step is to make the system applicable to aluminates (silica having already been done, apparently to death). Some surprising properties have also been observed with the spheres shrinking orders of magnitude and even turning square!

In parallel with this I have begun to work on controlling barite formation with a block co-polymer. The cool part is that this takes place in an inverse emulsion where the barite is confined to the size of the water droplet in which it is contained.

Analysis of the resulting morphologies is achieved using SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) and TEM (Transmission Electron Microscopy) techniques.

Always up for new ideas and strongly believe in Dr Halls philosophy of doing one off the wall experiment a day. It really works.