About
Sam is a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) at the University of Liverpool. She obtained her PhD in structural chemistry from the University of Birmingham, working with Dr. Maryjane Tremayne. Her doctoral research involved the development of evolutionary algorithms for structure determination of crystalline materials from powder diffraction data. She continued to carry out postdoctoral research on the impact of solvent on the crystalline forms adopted by pharmaceutical compounds, before moving into educational software development in the commercial sector.
Sam joined the University of Liverpool as a postdoc in 2008, working with Matt Rosseinsky on local structure analysis of disordered crystalline materials using total scattering methods, and the characterisation of guest-responsive metal-organic frameworks using powder X-ray diffraction. She subsequently moved to Andy Cooper’s group to work with porous organic molecular materials, particularly using in situ studies of porous organic cage crystals to understand their functional behaviour and advance design principles for molecular organic materials. She received an International Union of Crystallography Young Scientist Award in 2015 for her work on structure-function studies of porous organic materials using PXRD.
Sam joined the Materials Innovation Factory in November 2016. She is member of the Diamond Light Source Peer Review Panel. Her research focuses on the study of structure–function relationships in functional organic crystals and the development of efficient powder diffraction methods for accelerated materials discovery.
Prizes or Honours
- Young Scientist Award (International Union of Crystallography, 2015)