Profile

I am a Senior Scientist in the Product Innovation Team of Johnson Matthey Battery Materials. We are developing better materials for lithium ion batteries for the next generation of electric vehicles so that the cars of the future can go further, are faster, last longer and most importantly are better for our planet.

I manage a small team of people, and we make better battery materials by clever chemistry – not just changing the types of atoms that are present, but how they are located in relation to each other. We design and make new materials, and then carry out tests on them to see how we’ve managed to make them better. We work with teams of specialist analytical scientists to better understand our materials. Also, with other business functions including engineering teams to scale up production of our materials, commercial teams to sell our products and legal teams to ensure that we protect our ideas.

I have a really varied job, which is why I enjoy it so much. I really enjoy being a member of the Product Innovation Team as it means that I can work with great colleagues to try and make the best battery materials in the world for electric vehicles. I manage a small team, and I really enjoy working with them to plan projects, carry out experimental work, collect and analyse data in order to puzzle out what the atoms are doing in our materials, and how we can make them better.

I get to work with loads of different people in my job, and that makes it really interesting. We work with electrochemical test engineers to test out changes that we make to our materials and specialist scientific analysts who help us to understand exactly what we make in the lab. We have commercial teams all over the world who sell our products to customers – these are usually car manufacturers and electronics companies. They are always keen to hear about the improvements that we’ve made and get data to show our customers. If we want to produce enough of our battery materials for making into car batteries, we need to work with engineers who can design the machinery that goes in the factories, and make the manufacturing process as cheap and as safe as possible. It’s also really important to protect our ideas, so we work closely with patent attorneys (legal experts) to make sure that no other company can use our ideas. I am also lucky enough to work closely with chemists at Southampton University who are developing methods of studying our battery materials whilst they are being used.