Tell us a bit about your current job. 

I work at Imperial College London, in between the department of Physics and the department of Chemistry, and I look at new materials for electronic devices, particularly electronic devices that emit light. We're trying to work on new systems for mobile phone displays and television displays. The cool, novel aspect of it is that I work really closely with chemists to come up with new molecules that can give these displays properties that we've never been able to achieve before, and what we've been finding over the past couple of months is that they have awesome far-reaching applications, well beyond just display technologies. For example we can start to create really sensitive magnetic field detectors, or systems that are capable of detecting really, really weak light, which is important for lots of optical communications.

It's very much an experimental job. The labs that I work in are characterisation labs, so we either shine a laser on a material and look at the way light bounces off the sample and use that to understand what's happening to the molecules or we look at the way they emit light, so we might shine some light on them then the materials would absorb that light and really quickly re-emit it and we look at that light that's emitted to try and understand how the electrons inside the material are arranged.

You get to do a lot of cool things that no one has done before, to try and understand what the structures are that you've created and why they might be good or bad for whatever it is you want to use them for.

What and where did you study after school?

I did A-levels in maths, further maths, physics and art, and then I went to Chelsea School of Art   for a year. Then I did Physics as an undergraduate followed by a PhD in physics. 

How did you get from answer 2 to answer 1? 

I'm incredibly fortunate to have started my scientific career at Imperial and it's hard to imagine ever leaving because all of the insights, equipment and ideas on campus. I feel very loyal to it. I went as a confused teenager at 18–19 and I had an amazing support network of physics professors who were all incredibly interesting and doing really cool things. Every day is different and everyone you meet there is exciting. I feel on Cloud 9 to have found this job. 

I was brought up in a world where I was told that whilst you should do things you find interesting you should also do something that contributes in some way to society. My parents are both medical doctors and I think that whilst no one ever stated it specifically I was surrounded by the sense that your job should be something useful as well as being something that when you leave the lab at 6pm you keep thinking about it, and you keep asking questions, and that's definitely been something I've never stopped doing.

How does your formal education feed into your present career (if at all)? 

When I was at school, I was given the independence to explore subjects myself: I never really appreciated it at the time but now I do because I do quite a lot of work with schools and speak with teachers and students about studying physics. I now realise just how incredibly lucky I was to have a bit of freedom in the lessons and for us to be able to run our own science clubs, do our own investigations, make our own contributions to physics from age 16/17 – I think most people don't have that. 

Obviously I've been working in physics for a long time but I work really closely with chemists and I'm starting a new job in October in Materials. I'm still going to be at Imperial because it's a fantastic place to work; it’s incredibly good for the particular type of research I want to do.

What things have you learnt outside of formal education that have been helpful to your career? 

I definitely think taking art seriously at GCSE and A-level and taking a year to study art at Chelsea School of Art made a difference to me; I spent four or five months living in Florence, Italy and studying the Renaissance, and Italian, and it just made me realise that no one should be defined by one thing: physicists really like to get into this bubble where they sit in a physics department and write fancy-looking equations on a blackboard and think they're all geniuses and yet when you look at Renaissance Italy everyone could do everything – everyone could do metalwork, woodwork, needlework, put gold plates on the doors of a cathedral and paint the ceiling of the cathedral, and you just realise that you shouldn't be limited by being interested in one thing.

What are the really useful skills for someone in your job to possess? 

I definitely think being curious, being interested in the most bizarre and seemingly mundane things!

Being able to network and to make connections with people beyond your own discipline; the coolest areas of science now are incredibly interdisciplinary and to succeed in those you have to have connections beyond your own specific area and to be able to talk to people in all different departments and beyond your institution. In the past couple of years this has been transformative for my scientific research; I can read a paper and then email the people who wrote it saying 'it would be great if we could work together' and that has given us access to greater insights. 

You have to be patient, because a lot of what we do is very slow; sometimes we do experiments in big national research labs where you have 72 hours and that's all the time you're going to get for six months and you have to spend every single one of those hours incredibly productively. So you have to be willing to go through times when there's nothing new and nothing exciting, and then times when it's incredibly exciting and everything's happening incredibly quickly. 

The ability to work productively in a team is completely crucial; I work in a close team of 5 or 6 people and then a bigger team of about 20 across college. There's a lot of 'I'll help you because I'm an expert in this if you help me because you're an expert in that'. Because it's such experimental research you rely on many other members of the team to collect data and understand the system. It's key to be honest, transparent, and have that willingness to do things for other people because one day you'll need their help.

Also I think just enthusiastic, with the enthusiasm to keep doing experiments where you're only making incremental changes but you're learning so much. I aspire to maintain that enthusiasm even when I reach a senior position. 

What does an average day at work look like for you? 

Certainly at the moment there's no such thing! We weren't able to get into the lab for a few months because of lockdown. But before Covid happened I was doing a huge (maybe unnecessary) amount of travel, sometimes to places to do experiments but often to give a talk or deliver a seminar or things like that. I can't think of a time I've gone this long without being on an aeroplane or being in an airport, and it's been a blessing. 

But on a typical day if we've got some new materials I'd start off in the Clean Room, which is, unsurprisingly, a very clean room. It has fewer than 1,000 particles per cubic metre, so it's really, really clean compared to the outside world. We do a lot of the processing and experimentation with the samples in there and then go out to the different labs to try and understand what's going on. So I would spend a couple of hours in there making sure that I've created the perfect structure to go and analyse and study later.

Sometimes we might then need to go and do some further processing in a room called the Glove Box, which is basically what it sounds like – a big box full of nitrogen with gloves poking out. Nitrogen is inert so it protects all your materials from degrading, and so you do all the processing in this inert environment. You can't be in nitrogen yourself because obviously you need oxygen to breathe, so we work outside poking our hands in with the gloves. Maybe then it will be lunchtime or we'll have a quick catch-up meeting or we'll have something to read so while they're processing I go and turn equipment on (all of the equipment we work with needs a bit of time to warm up). It's amazing – you know you're doing the right job when you start doing an experiment and think 'I'll just spend half an hour here' and before you know it two or three hours have passed and it's 6pm – they're the fun days! The other days, when you're not doing a new experiment, might involve long meetings or sitting at the computer to analyse the data you've collected. We usually put the data and its 'story' into a presentation to send to the people that we've collaborated with. There's a lot of hands-on experimental science and there will be days when it's just that, but of course there are days where you're much more at your computer, analysing and understanding. 

What’s the best thing about your job? 

We look for systems that can twist light. What I do a lot is study the way that materials emit or absorb 'twisted' light and I know that to do that I have to get exactly the right recipe and exactly the right temperature – it's very much like cooking. When I get to the exciting data – sometimes the signals we get are so strong that I have to change the properties of the machine because it's not capable of detecting signals that strong – I'm like 'this is the greatest thing ever'! Or when we're doing these really long experiments at synchrotron, at one of the national labs – the night before I always feel 'why did I sign up to this?' but then when I get there I'm like 'this is the greatest thing ever, I'm not going to sleep I love this so much!'. It's the thrill of collecting cool data; I really love that. 

What’s your least favourite aspect of your job? 

Having meetings that shouldn't be meetings. If you've found something really cool you'll send an email the minute you've collected the data so everyone will already know about it, but at times bosses still say 'we need to have a full team meeting with everyone presenting for 15 minutes' and in a team of 10 you're facing a 3-hour meeting before you've even had lunch – I lose the will to live.

Also there are times when not everyone feels included. We spend a lot of time going to scientific conferences, which have historically been very exclusionary for women, particularly those who might have caring responsibilities – if you have kids or other family members to care for it's hard to get away to international conferences, and that's where a lot of the networking happens. There are parts of those conferences which are so old-school you wouldn't believe it: huge drinking sessions. Science is very hierarchical so you have the senior leaders; these are the people who organise the conferences, who put together the sessions and the list of speakers, and I think science would be a lot better if power was more evenly distributed, especially as we, the younger scientists, are the ones doing the actual experiments. The early-career scientists are the ones making the discoveries but your career path can be dictated by old men who made discoveries 40 years ago – I really hate that. I find it quite uncomfortable being at conferences when all these old chummy people are just using it as an opportunity to get hammered with their friends without giving thought to the early-career scientists who are there to try and develop their careers. 

We also have this huge issue in science that it's so white and patriarchal. There were so many more men than women 50 years ago and they trained the younger generation to be just like them, to be dismissive of women's ideas, dismissive of people of colour's ideas and interests, and that's perpetuated in science to this day. So you can get really bad behaviour – blatant racism and sexism, and issues with sexual harassment and bullying. It is changing; people are standing up and fighting back. The Me Too movement inspired a wave of that in academia but it still doesn't feel, particularly in physics, like it's moving fast enough. 

We need people from all different backgrounds because there are so many discoveries that will happen more quickly and be more fun if we have people with a more diverse range of experiences involved. Science likes to perpetuate the myth of the genius, rather than thinking about the importance of teamwork, and it's partly that which makes it so difficult for women and people of colour to get the recognition they deserve. Certainly there's a generation of scientists like me who are fighting against it and we need as many people as we can get – every group who's been traditionally marginalised has a huge amount to contribute to our understanding of the world. 

What (concrete) advice would you give to someone seeking a job like yours? 

Don't give up! There are times when you'll feel like you're not as good as everyone around you but that's just the way society's made you feel; it's nothing to do with your own abilities. I struggled so much with things like Further Maths at school and I never thought I'd end up in the situation I'm in today, where someone actually pays me to do science – it's just the most bizarre and wonderful thing! So I would say, don't give up and find that part of science that really, really excites you, that one little thing. Find that one area that you think you could contribute to, that will keep you up all night asking questions, because then you've got a job that doesn't feel like a job – then you've got a job that just feels like a privilege. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do what I do. 

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Emily Nightingale, Research Fellow in Statistical Modelling

Image credit: Dave Guttridge, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons