I am a postdoctoral researcher working on projects mostly associated with mineral nucleation mechanisms and am responsible for the organic chemistry laboratory.

Clays are a very common group of minerals at the Earths surface. However, the exact mechanisms leading to their formation are not clear due to practical difficulties of replicating and observing natural clay formation in the laboratory setting. My main project aims to find pathways to circumvent problems encountered in clay synthesis such as slow reaction rates and low concentrations of source elements. I am also interested in the effect of minor elements on the reaction products in previously established clay and zeolite synthesis methods.

All sedimentary rocks contain a small fraction of magnetic minerals that provide an experimentally simple yet powerful method to characterize various aspects of the formation conditions provided magnetic minerals and their formation processes are understood. One of my projects aims to understand magnetic mineral transformation processes encountered in suboxic-anoxic sediments by creating analogous conditions in a laboratory.

Mineral nucleation

Mineral synthesis

Fluid-solid interactions

Mineral magnetic properties

(Thesis title: "A combined experimental and computational study of nanopaleomagnetic recorders in meteoritic metal")

(Project title: "The development of an asymmetric method for the synthesis of 1,3 diols using copper catalysis and iodonium salts")

2010 - 2013 BA Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge