I am a member of the Theoretical and Computational Physics Group (TCPG) working at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in Harwell, Oxfordshire, UK. The TCPG works together with a number of scientific communities in the development, deployment, maintenance and training of computational modelling codes mostly based on electronic structure theories.

I am currently working on research projects in collaboration with the muon spectroscopy community. Muon spectroscopy is a powerful experimental technique that has the ability to probe the atomic local structure and magnetic environment in different materials. Some of the application areas include unconventional superconductivity, quantum magnetism, semiconductor physics and charge transport.

I am a 2019 Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute.

Before

Science Policy

Between January and April of 2016, I worked as Scientific Advisor for the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. This role involved teaching at the Science and Public Policy core module in the the Master of Public Policy. This Master is a one-year taught degree course, whose purpose is to enable students to develop analytical and critical skills relevant for understanding the challenges of public policy and its implementation. In particular, the Science and Public Policy module considers ways of understanding scientific and medical evidence, the policy implications of this evidence, and the interplay between science and conflicting policy concerns.

Intellectual Property

From November 2011 to September 2015 I worked as trainee patent attorney and patent assistant for the British firms Marks & Clerk and Boult. My job involved the drafting, preparation, filing and prosecution of PCT, UK and European patents in areas of expertise which included: nanotechnology, mechanical engineering, telecommunications, medical devices, manufacturing processes, software and computer-implemented inventions. As part of my training, I obtained a postgraduate certificate in Intellectual Property from Queen Mary University of London.

Research

Between January 2006 and September 2011 I worked as a Research Associate at Imperial College London, where I was part of the London Centre for Nanotechnology. I was mostly involved in two large multidisciplinary projects. The first project was related to the computational modelling of thin films, and it was in collaboration with four universities (Loughborough, Newcastle, Reading and Cambridge) and two industrial partners (Applied Multilayers and Pilkington Glass). The second project was related to nanostructured materials for energy applications, and included research groups from Imperial College and several industrial partners, such as Camfridge Ltd and Ericsson. My role was to develop and implement a theoretical formalism that could be used for the modelling of dfferent nanosystems. The implementation was done using High Performance Computing platforms using computer codes based on Density Functional Theory (DFT), such as the CRYSTAL and CASTEP codes.

Science Journalism

From July 2010 and October 2011, I worked as an editor and freelance science writer for Form and Content Media Limited, a London-based media company. My job included re-writing, editing, proofing and formatting expert-written articles in the areas of Nanotechnology, Alternative Energies, Illumination and Displays, and Optical Design and Engineering. The articles were published in the web-based technical news service ’SPIE Newsroom’. SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies.