The central pillar of my research is gaining a fundamental understanding of competitive intermolecular interactions and solvation patterns in liquids. Model systems of iteratively increasing complexity are selected to target interactions with specific applied systems in mind. To date I have focused on aromatics and substituted aromatics which underpin protein frameworks (benzene, Nat Comm 2023; phenols, ChemRxiv 2025), sulfur heteroaromatics for plastic electronics (thiophenes, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2023), industrially relevant solvents (DMF/DMSO, J. Phys. Chem. B 2023), and battery electrolytes (ACS Energy Lett. 2024).
Weak Cooperative Interactions
Neutron scattering plays a critical role in my research as it allows me to disentangle energetically comparable molecular behaviours, due to its unique sensitivity to hydrogens that either X-rays or electron diffraction techniques do not possess. The contribution of the experimental data is key to reveal subtle molecular mechanisms and strong molecular structuring as classical simulations alone cannot often predict. Nat. Commun. 2023
Liquid/Nanomaterial Interfaces
The main experimental challenge of studying liquids at interfaces is the small fraction of solvent at the surface relative to the bulk, which dominates the measurement. One way to overcome this challenge is to investigate liquid suspensions of nanomaterials, where, thanks to the high surface to volume ratio, the scattering signal from the monolayer increases up to a significant 10 % of the total. In this manner, I extracted an atomistic picture of the interface providing unique information for the use of these materials as energy storage capacitors. Nat. Nanotechnol. 2025
