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Many nano-materials have very promising properties that would be great for use in electronics (like smartphones and computers), sensing (like glucose sensors for diabetics) and materials strengthening (like car hulls or tennis rackets).

Unfortunately a lot of the ways these materials are made in a lab are not feasible for industrial use as they are too slow or expensive. Think about it like building a car: You can spend a year building one in your  garage, making even the screws yourself, but if you want to sell a million of them you really need to improve your process (a conveyor belt and a factory will be necessary for a start). In a similar fashion I work on devising methods for making these nano-materials on large scales without reducing their quality too much so they can actually make their way into your phones and computers rather than just stay a concept in a lab.

My approach is to take small molecules and combine them in certain ways to build useful structures that can then be implemented in everyday devices on a large scale. In contrast to some other methods this process can be expanded to making large quantities of these materials without much added cost or time.

It’s very similar to the everyday workday you probably see from your own parents.

I arrive in work sometime between 9 and 10 am, turn on my computer and check e-mails. After that I generally turn on my tools and start a process, the parameters and conditions adjusted to previous results. When a sample has been made there are various analysis techniques I can use. Depending on which one(s) I use, there is some sample preparation involved which can take a while. If the analysis turns out to be good, I pass the sample on to some colleagues who make interesting devices with it (like transistors, the basic building block of any computer chip or a simple gas sensor). If it’s bad (which is usually the case) I have to deduce if it was better or worse than previous ones and adjust my synthesis conditions to further improve my materials.

In between that I generally have lunch at some point, meetings, teaching and general chat with my colleagues.

Doesn’t sound like that much fun to you? It can be tedious at times but when you succeed at making something that nobody in the world has made before it makes all the hardship worth it!