Profile

I’m trying to get more and more young people involved and interested in the sciences. Everything from a tattoo artist being aware of the presence to polyaromatic hydrocarbons in tattoo inks to the knowledge that pytheroids present in agrochemicals can alter honey bee behaviour – science is everywhere and we should talk about it more. That’s why I got more involved with the Royal Society of Chemistry. I’m also a STEM Ambassador and was a mentor for the 2018 Bronze Industrial Cadets Programme.

I do a lot of small science at home. My current project at home is distilling essential oils (Not whisky. I repeat not whisky). I’ve recently acquired an alembic distillation kit and looking forward to extracting various essential oils at home. Anyone got any fragrant plants for me?

So far I have made lavender oil, rosemary oil and cinnamon oil. The lavender oil was just so lovely and fun to make. The cinnamon oil was a little more technical as I had to do some solvent extraction to properly isolate the oil.

I came out to the UK to study  Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Kingston University. Funny enough, when I left university, I applied for a job in BP as I missed working in petroleum! I then joined BP Fuels Development after I completed my BSc. I spent 7 years with in various departments developing new fuels and claims in Aviation, Marine, Diesel and in my last 2 years, as a Gasoline Development Technologist.

BP was great fun. I spent many years playing around with different fuel formulations, testing them in the labs and then assessing their performance in engines and vehicles.

For the last 5 years I’ve been with Haltermann Carless as Technical Services & Development Manager. Here I am the linkage between our refineries and our commercial strategy. Being a much smaller company, it’s a much faster paced job involving the development of new speciality chemicals for several applications such as construction chemicals and agrochemicals.

I am mainly office based and really enjoy the days of the week I go to our refinery.

I have several projects on the go at any time, ranging from developing special products for our customers, to designing new products for our upcoming new units at the refineries (ask me about hydrogenation!). I also help answer odd technical questions from our customers on our oil grades – such as helping them find the viscosity index of an oil to telling them the auto-ignition point of an oil. Auto-ignition  temperature is very important to know – tells you how high you can heat equipment up without blowing up the factory!