Profile

I’m Katherine, and I’m a 24 year old PhD student living in Leeds with my older sister. She loves living with me because I do all the cooking! I’m also a vegan, which I think has made me a better cook as I have had to think outside the box with the things that I make.

My favourite thing to do in my free time is go to gigs or music festivals as I love live music. I also try and go skiing once a year, and this year I’m going to Andorra, which is a tiny country between France and Spain. I’ve been skiing since I was 9 and learnt to snowboard on my ski season, which I did during the winter of 2017/18. I’m the one in orange.

I love going travelling, and have been to 25 countries around the world. Madagascar was probably my favourite, as it was so beautiful and I got to hand-feed lemurs.

I also write for the science section of the university newspaper, which is pretty cool as I can write about pretty much whatever I like. I recently wrote an article about the huge locust swarms in East Africa.

I’ve always really cared about the environment, so I was shocked when I learnt that every single bit of plastic that has ever been put in landfill is still there and hasn’t broken down. I was also horrified at the amount of plastic waste that the world makes – and so I decided I wanted to do something about it.

The thing I am most interested in is changing plastic into more valuable stuff – in my case this ‘stuff’ is called carbon nanotubes, or CNTs for short. Nanotubes are very, very, very small tubes of carbon that are only a few atoms thick but hundreds of atoms long. (Nano means 0.000000001). You can see one in the picture below, which was taken using a special type of microscope. The dark grey blob is a metal, and this is what carbon atoms latch onto to grow into tubes.

But why bother making CNTs? Well, because they do loads of cool things. They are extremely strong – if you made a tube of steel the same size as a CNT, the CNT would be 100 times stronger. They also have very interesting electrical behaviour, and scientists are trying to make electric parts out of CNTs that could be put into your phone to make it run faster.

The reason that I can grow CNTs from plastic is because plastic is FULL of long chains of carbon. My job is to get the carbon atoms out of these chains and reassemble them into CNTs, which I do by heating up the plastic. The reactor I use is in the photo below.

I use different types of electromagnetic radiation to in lots of different ways. One of the most common things I do is use x-rays and visible light to look at bonds between carbon atoms – this tells me if I have made CNTs, and if they are any good.

As a PhD student, I get to plan what I do every day and I try to make every day a bit different so that I don’t get bored. In a normal week, I try to do two or three experiments to make nanotubes – and these usually take me all day.

I spend the rest of my time on the computer crunching the numbers from experiments I have done, reading about other scientists doing experiments like to mine or writing news articles for the university newspaper.

I work in an open-plan office, so there are always people around to go and have lunch with or grab a cup of tea. My desk is close to my supervisor’s office so I have to make sure I’m not procrastinating too much. A PhD supervisor is someone that is an expert in your area of science and is there to guide and support you throughout your PhD. I have three supervisors so I’m very well supported!