Author: Emma Hughes

#WNBiPonWednesdays: Dr Isabel Rabey

For this week’s #WNBiPonWednesdays, we’ve interviewed Dr Isabel Rabey, a senior teaching fellow in the Physics Education Group! Thank you for your time Izzie!.

What do you do on a day-to-day basis?

I’m a Teaching Fellow, which means I don’t do physics research anymore, but I’m focused on the education and the undergraduate curriculum. This year, I’ve been made Head of Year 1 Labs and Projects. So a lot of my time is spent learning what this role involves, so a lot of organizing, students, demonstrators, making sure everything runs smoothly, all the equipment and helping with the technicians, talking to them, all the assessments and the feedback – so a lot of new things that I’ve never done before.

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#WNBiPonWednesdays: Dr Jess Wade

We are back with another week of #WNBiPonWednesdays! This week we had the amazing opportunity to interview to Dr Jess Wade, an associate professor in functional materials! Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Jess. ⚛️🥼

As an introduction, what is your area of expertise?

I work in new materials for future technologies- optoelectronic, electronic, spintronic and quantum technologies. We are particularly interested in how we can use these molecules to tell us information about their environments. If we can make them really sensitive, they could be used for new types of magnetic imaging systems for brain scanning. My interest in molecules started from the physics department at Imperial, thinking about how we can use molecular (“organic”) semiconductors for solar panels. These molecules have very attractive properties for quantum technologies as well. Molecules have accessible quantum states (e.g. electronic or spin levels), that can be manipulated to create superpositions using optical or electrical pulses. They are also inherently reproducible, scalable and operate at room temperature, which is good for engineering quantum technologies ready for the real world. Imperial has great strengths in molecular semiconductors for optoelectronics, and the development of quantum sensors, so we’re in a great place to explore molecular quantum.

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#WNBiPonWednesdays: Charlotte Cao

We are back for Week 3 of #WNBiPonWednesdays ! This week we spoke to Charlotte, a 3rd year undergraduate who is currently running the IPRL research branch in Space Society. Thank you for talking with us Charlotte! ⭐️

What is your favourite area in Physics?

I say something different every time someone asks, but I think maybe something fundamental, I really enjoy seeing beyond standard model physics. The data analysis and seeing it in experiments, there are so many phenomena beyond what the standard model predicts, for example charged particle asymmetry and its really cool to see it in experiments and try to fill in the gaps, I think that’s really interesting.

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#WNBiPonWednesdays: Dr Linda Cremonesi

We are back with another #WNBiPonWednesdays! This week we interviewed Linda Cremonesi, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Associate Professor in Particle Physics. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us Linda 😁

Can you explain your area of expertise?

My area of research is particle physics, especially neutrinos. Neutrinos are somewhat like the smallest bit of matter that human brains could think of, because we don’t know how small their mass is. At most it’s 1eV, but it could be a million times smaller than that, or even more. My specialty is looking at neutrino oscillations– neutrinos come in three flavours (as far as we know), and when a neutrino is produced in a specific flavour, after it travels from a place to another this flavour can change. But what we don’t know yet is whether neutrinos and anti-neutrinos behave in the same way. The experiments that I work on are trying to understand the differences between neutrino and anti-neutrino oscillations. This is because we want to understand the differences in behaviour between matter and anti-matter and then link it to the origin of the universe.

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