I’m from Perth, Western Australia. It’s famously the most isolated capital city on Earth. My undergraduate studies were a bit of a shambles. I initially studied physics at the University of Western Australia, but dropped out after my first year and unpacked trucks in the basement of a department store for a year or so (it seems like a good idea at the time). Eventually, I went back and fumbled around until I accumulated enough credits for a major in Chemistry. I was very lucky to have a couple of excellent lecturers who were no-frills experimental physical chemists (Dr Duncan Wild & Prof Allan McKinley) who managed to show me that anything worth knowing in chemistry was actually just physics.

After graduating, I left Perth and moved to Melbourne, on the east coast of Australia. This was a standard right-of-passage for disillusioned young people in Perth. I was thoroughly convinced I was done with science, and spent the first year mooching around on friends couches and got really good at Magic: the Gathering, to the point that I legitimately considered a career as a professional trading card game player.

Ultimately, I decided that I needed a fall-back plan. So, I enrolled in a one-year Honours degree at the University of Melbourne. I can’t exactly remember what I had expected would come from going back to school, but I do know that research resonated with me in a way that school and undergraduate never had. I never had the patience/focus/discipline, call it what you will, to engage with the parts of the course I didn’t enjoy and was perpetually frustrated at having to move on from the interesting bits.

Learning how things really work has been a lifelong interest that (according to my parents) pre-dates my ability to speak. Research gave me autonomy to choose a direction, and presented a constantly evolving problem to solve. Suffice to say, I was hooked. After Honours, I got a PhD position at La Trobe University, working for Dr Evan Robertson (no relation) who gave me a rigorous training in electronic and infrared laser spectroscopy of molecules and clusters in molecular beams.

I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but during my PhD, I became more interested in what was happening to the system when it interacted with the laser light, and less about the spectroscopy itself. After reading around, it turns out this was called photochemical reaction dynamics. After submitting my thesis, I moved back to Perth for a couple of month and then moved to the UK to take a postdoc position in the group of Prof Andrew Orr-Ewing at the University of Bristol and got a chance to learn about ultrafast chemical dynamics from some of the best minds in the game.

After a couple of (COVID disrupted) years in Bristol, I took another postdoc position at the University of Oxford, working for Prof Claire Vallance. My research at Oxford studied electron-molecule collisions, correlation imaging techniques and ultrafast structural dynamics. I also taught physical chemistry tutorials at Hertford College, where the overwhelming fear of being discovered to be a fraud forced me to become a much, much better and more well-rounded physical chemist.

After being rejected for an independent fellowship at Oxford in the middle of 2023, I decided, on a whim, to find out where I stood and applied for the position of Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham.

The rest is history, as they say.