Meet the scientists!

Light is amazing stuff, and all too often we take it for granted. In the field of Biology, the existing tools for controlling cells involved using mechanical tweezers to pick them up, and using micro-fine needles for doing injections into the cells.  Within our research in Physics, we are now using nothing but light – a laser beam in fact – to pick up and control the cells without actually touching them, and if we aren’t touching them, we aren’t harming them! Even more, we are at the point where we can inject materials into a cell for work on genetic modification.

In my work, we are using a laser to pick up a special type of crystal and making it spin on the spot. Weirdly, the crystal is spherical, and by looking at how fast it turns, we can find out how ‘gloopy’ the liquid is, or, if we know how gloopy it is, we can find out what temperature it is at!  It’s important do to this because how do you measure ‘gloopiness’ inside a cell, or on tiny volumes of liquid? We can figure out how gloopy a bucket of liquid is, but sometimes we only have a tiny sample to work with, such as material actually inside a cell!

It sounds like a cliché, but there isn’t really a typical day for me!  I can be planning an experiment, or optimising the manufacture of the spherical crystals.  Quite a lot of my day is spent either analysing data, or looking for ways to improve the speed at which the crystals rotate.  Another aspect of my work is educating people of all ages about the work that we do in our labs, and explaining just how light can be so strange.  It’s a real thrill when you look at the data to see something that is brand new knowledge – sometimes it confirms a model that you proposed for a certain phenomenon, othertimes it shows you a better model is needed.  It’s all a step towards finding what you are actually looking for!

I love science, and I love the work that I do. I want to share that with everyone and show just what science has done for us in this world.  Part of what makes science so fascinating is how weird some things are, and I would leap at the chance to explain these to people who typically don’t come across these  wonderful phenomena.