Profile

Hi! I’m Hugh! I like photography, sports, video-games, technology, food and traveling! I’m a nano materials researcher, I develop and organise outreach activities for the Advanced Materials and Bio Engineering Research Centre in Trinity College Dublin!

It’s hard to imagine places we’ve never been to before. If I described a country to you, you may be able to imagine something based on places which are familiar to you. If I tried to describe the nanoscale to you, I may as well begin to describe an alien planet.
Imagine shrinking down to the width of a human hair, (a hair’s width varies, but for this example we’ll use 100 micrometres (μm) or 0.1 mm) congratulations, you’re halfway to the nanoscale. Shrink yourself again, by a factor of a thousand, you’re now 0.1 μm or 100 nanometres (nm).

Now, the type of nanomaterial you are, depends on what shape you are, if you’re a little sphere, block, or blob around 100 nm in all your dimensions you’re a zero-dimensional nanoparticle. If you’re flat and stretch out in your other two dimensions, like a sheet of paper, you’re a two-dimensional material, like graphene. However, if you happen to be one-dimensional, resembling a piece of uncooked spaghetti, you’re a nanowire, and I think you’re quite interesting.

I make measurements using electricity and light on lots of different types of nanowires, I look at single nanowires and then a whole bunch of nanowires called a network. A network is useful because it means we can make new types of materials and coat surfaces with a mesh of the nanowires, “It’s like throwing spaghetti at a plate” my Professor John J. Boland said, its actually a little more complicated. We spray the spaghetti nanowires onto the surface and let them randomly form a network. Depending on what material the nanowires are made out of, the network behaves in different and interesting ways.

Picture (a) shows a piece of plastic sprayed with silver nanowires, if we zoom in on them you see the network of wires in (b). Zooming in even further, to the nanoscale, you can see two nanowires forming a single connection in the network!

Silver nanowires form networks which are great and conducting electricity, and so small that they let lots of light past, these are called Transparent Conductors and they’re a key component in displays, touch screens, solar cells, lighting and transparent heaters, we can spray our networks on plastic, whereas the materials we currently use behave like glass, this means we can make flexible versions the things I’ve just listed, making them cheaper and less likely to break when dropped!

I think flexible phone screens would be awesome!

Being a researcher means you have a bit of flexibility in your working hours, which is nice, it means I usually begin work at 10 and finish at 6, or sometimes if I’m doing an experiment and getting good data I’ll stay much later! I live less than 2 km from the University which means I can easily walk to work, but most days I cycle!

I work in an office with lots of other PhD students and researchers, this means we all get to work together and ask each other questions if we’re having problems. It makes for a nice atmosphere and helps the research, lots of people means lots of different ideas!

We have group meetings every two weeks where each member of the group presents their research progress, and we get to have a discussion about the research.