Profile

Hi, I’m Jen, I’m 24 and a PhD student originally from Chester. I studied Physics at the University of Liverpool and I am now doing my PhD in Chemistry at the University of Birmingham and Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France. As part of my PhD, I started an awesome adventure at the beginning of this year and moved to France (beating both Brexit and Covid in the process)! Grenoble is a very different place to work, it’s in the heart of the Alps so everywhere you look there are mountains, and great bakeries on every corner.

Outside of the lab, my main hobbies are baking and crafting – here is one of my proudest ever bakes, a family of biscuit sheep!

I like all sorts of art, but particularly sewing and I make a lot of the clothes that I wear. I have also made two (mathematically precise) patchwork quilts!

When I say magnet, I bet most of you picture something like this – you can find these in every school around the world.

Magnets always have two poles – a North pole and a South pole. We draw lines between the poles to show the direction of the magnetic field, which always travels from North to South. Inside these magnets, there are loads of mini magnets – we call these magnetic moments. Scientists are lazy so we just draw an arrow and the direction tells us which way North points.

These magnetic moments act as the building blocks of all magnets. Most of the time, we don’t think of materials as being magnetic, that’s because all the arrows are pointing in different directions, in science we call this a paramagnet. Frogs are paramagnets, check out this video where a bunch of crazy scientists made a frog float using a super strong magnet. We are also paramagnets but we don’t have a strong enough magnet to make us float (yet)!

The magnets that you stick to your fridge are called ferromagnets, all that means is that all the moments line up inside and point in one direction.

We can also have an antiferromagnet, where the moments point in opposite directions.

Sometimes, its not possible to get all the arrows to point in a way that they would like. Try drawing out a square and making all the moments point in an antiferromagnetic way (remember, everyone has to be opposite). That’s pretty easy, but now do the same thing with a triangle. Not so easy, right?

Whichever way you try, two of them will always have to point the same way – this is what makes a magnet unhappy and leads to some really cool science which is what I try to understand.

I do lots of different things in my job, I make these materials in a lab and then study them in experiments. I mainly use neutrons (part of the atom) and because the things we study are really small, the experiments we do are really big. I work at the Insititut Laue-Langevin, which is a nuclear reactor facility used for science (not energy).

I get the tram to work in the morning, and check my emails when I get to my desk.

This is where I work (Institut Laue-Langevin) – the nuclear reactor is in the big white dome and I sit in an office right next to it

Then I look at any data I might have collected overnight and plan out my experiments for the day. I go to the lab for a couple of hours to make some samples, this involves mixing together different chemicals and heating them up to very high temperatures (1500 C)! Unfortunately I don’t make anything with pretty colours 🙁

My lab

Then I go back to my desk and do some data analysis – this can be using computer programs to fit my data or writing my own computer programs if I need something more specific. Sometimes I get to make pretty pictures like this…

These cool looking pictures show the data we measured in the ying and the model (what we think is happening in the material) in the yang. As you can see, we guessed correctly this time!

Then I go to lunch with the other students, this is one of my favourite parts of the day because all the students are from different countries so I get to learn a lot about different cultures. It’s also pretty funny at the moment with Covid because we have these plastic screens between us, so if we are sat on a diagonal we can’t hear each other at all.

After lunch, I go back to my desk and continue with my data analysis. I normally have some sort of meeting, either with my supervisors, a seminar (talk given by another scientist) or French class. I might read some papers or do a writing task depending on the day. Then I set up any experiments for the evening and go home.

In the evening, I usually do some sort of craft activity to chill out – at the moment I’m learning to crochet.