Profile
Isabel Cooley
My CV
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Education:
The Blue School (2008-2015)
University of Nottingham (2015-2019 undergraduate, 2019-present PhD)
McGill University, Canada (2017-2018) -
Qualifications:
11 GCSEs
4 A levels (English literature, Maths, Further maths, Chemistry)
1 AS level (French)
Degree in Chemistry with an international study year -
Work History:
Football referee
Independent tutor for GCSE/A level maths and chemistry
Summer research project at my University (2018) -
Current Job:
PhD student
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About Me:
I’m a first year PhD student in computational chemistry at the University of Notitngham. In my spare time I like to play sports, especially quidditch.
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I live in Nottingham where I’m doing my PhD, but I grew up in Somerset and I got to live in Canada for a year during my degree.
I started playing quidditch when I started University 5 years ago, and now I’ve played in three different countries (the UK, Canada, and the USA). I play other sports too, like fencing and cricket.
I can lick my own elbow, even though it’s supposed to be impossible. -
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Taking dangerous greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere is really important to help tackle climate change. People also need very pure gases to be able to make lots of things that we need, and it can take a lot of energy to purify them, so we need to find greener ways to do it.
I work with a special type of material which has very tiny pores that can capture gas molecules inside them. If we can design materials that capture the right gases they can take carbon dioxide out of the air or make very pure gases without damaging the environment.
In Chemistry, there is some very important maths that describes how individual atoms and molecules behave. It can be used to predict what will happen if different molecules are next to each other, like if some gas is near to one of these materials. It’s too much to be done by humans though – even a computer can take days to do it.
My work is to make computers do this maths to work out how gases will behave around different materials so that the right ones can be made. I have to think about the individual atoms and what they do.
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My Typical Day:
My day is split between learning more science, doing new calculations myself, and working out what my results mean.
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I’ll be researching this for 3.5 years (my whole PhD) and I’ve only just started so it’s really important that I read a lot about what other scientists have done in my area. This will mean I understand new problems when I come across them, and that I know exactly what the problems scientists currently need to tackle are. It will also help me to have good ideas about how to solve them.
I also spend time getting my own new data. My University has some really powerful computers and I need to tell them exactly how to do the maths to work out what I want to know. Then I look at the numbers that come out and work out what they mean about a particular material. Sometimes I have to write my own computer code so that the computer will do the right thing.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I would use it for a science festival where scientists share their discoveries with ordinary people called Pint of Science.
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My Interview
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What did you want to be after you left school?
I used to want to be an author
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Not really, I was quite well behaved
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