Biography

During my time at Cambridge I worked in a Supramolecular Chemistry group in which I made many, many good friends including Gates Scholars Sophie Beeren and Nandhini Ponnuswamy. The original goal of my research was to design, synthesize, and study a divalent porphyrinic ligand which would bind two different metal centres. Although the proposed synthetic methodology had been used extensively for thousands of other similiar derivates, when using the particular synthetic precursors I chose, a different kind of molecule was generated. My PhD became a much more fundamental and synthetic endeavour than I or my supervisor had expected. I investigated the structure and properties of the new molecule (an expanded porphyrin)and also the reaction that generated it.