Welcome
I am a soft matter computational physicist,
and my current research is mostly in
two areas. The first is the nucleation
of crystals, and other processes driven by so-called
rare events, and the second is biological physics.
Nucleation is the first step in the formation of a crystal,
and it is a rare event in the sense that only one
nucleation event is required to make a crystal.
My biological physics research is mainly into the dynamics
of proteins inside cells.
For further details of my research, see my Research page. I like to think that, when the caffeine and blood sugar levels are high enough, I am a pretty good scientist, but nowadays metrics are very fashionable; by one metric I am about twice as good as a Nobel (and Ignobel) prize winning scientist's hamster.
I also teach students here at Surrey - teaching page here, but most of the course material is on Surrey's VLE, SurreyLearn. (Surrey account required to login).
I contribute to a blog. You can see there for slightly random thoughts on science that I find interesting.
This site uses a template by FreeCSSTemplates. Thanks to them. The picture above is of a bay in my native south Wales.
I obtained a BSc in Chemical Physics (1992)
and then a PhD (1995) at the
University of Sheffield. The PhD was
with George Jackson (now at Imperial), and
was mainly on calculations of liquid phase diagrams.
From 1995 to 1997 I was a postdoc
at AMOLF, a research institute in Amsterdam.
I worked with
Bela Mulder and Daan Frenkel (now at Cambridge).
Then I spent one year in the sun at
UCLA in Los Angeles,
working for Bill Gelbart and Jim Heath (now at Caltech).
This was on modelling the self-assembly of Jim's metal nanoparticles
at the water/air interface.