India Willimott

Background

About India Willimott

During my PhD, I have gained significant experience in materials synthesis and have become proficient in materials characterisation techniques including TGA, BET, SEM, FTIR, NMR, PXRD and analysing ICP and CHN analysis data. I was also part of a collaboration, with Prof. Carole Perry at Nottingham Trent University. This project required excellent communication skills, as I had to understand and convey our different disciplines which affected our judgement for the project direction, driven from different data sources, all from a distance via email, teleconferences, meetings, and presentations. This project has given me the opportunity to explore new analysis techniques, such as the handling and isolation of peptides from DMF and mass spectrometry. During my PhD, I have had the opportunity to partake in many different teaching scenarios. This includes lab demonstrating and marking for first and second-year undergraduates, providing general advice and direction to help and improve their synthesis techniques, as well as offering constructive feedback on their lab book and reports. I was given a great opportunity to support, develop, execute and mark a third-year advance practical, whilst supervising bachelors and masters students in my research lab. This included training the students on the necessary equipment available for their projects, as well as guiding the direction of their projects and giving advice on presentations, posters and reports. I am keen to take advantage of opportunities for professional development and have attended courses in scientific writing and presentation skills. I also have attended programme-based courses such an Olex 2, JMP design of experiment and CCDC workshop. As well as attending modules for crystallography, have given me the resources to be able to characterise powder X-ray diffraction data - from indexing patterns to assessing cell strain - and the basic knowledge for refining single crystal data.