Research

I describe some of my research interests below, but I strongly believe that research is best communicated in dialogue: please get in touch if you want to know more or share your thoughts.

JSPS Research Fellowship: High-throughput screening

I’ve recently started my first postdoc as a JSPS Research Fellow in the Ota Laboratory at RCAST, University of Tokyo. My research here centres around developing and applying high-throughput screening methods enabled by microfluidic sorting, and builds on the skills I’ve acquired during my PhD (see below).

PhD: Label-free optical detection of biomolecules

I graduated with my PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2023. For a quick visual introduction, here’s the graphical abstract of my PhD dissertation:

(Link to PDF version)

In brief, the research of my PhD involved a new class of optofluidic waveguides called hollow-core photonic crystal fibres. These custom-designed glass fibres, around as thick as a human hair, surround a sub-50 μm fluid channel with microstructures as thin as the wavelength of light. This confinement of light by anti-resonant interference leads to strong light-matter interaction, and also allowed us to collect and guide ultraviolet light across tens of centimeters (aspect ratios over 1000) of a protein solution, while still being sub-μL in volume. In my PhD, I designed, assembled and carried out biophysical experiments based on these techniques, enabling us to analyse sub-μL solutions of label-free proteins, native or monitoring their aggregation, both within continuously-flowing microfluidic circuits.

For more details, you can refer to the poster below, which I presented in different versions at the Winton Symposium Sustainable Futures 2022, the Methods and Applications of Fluorescence 2022 conference, and the Cavendish Laboratory Graduate Conference 2021, where it won the award for best poster.

(Link to higher resolution image file)

Finally, if this made you curious and you would like to read the full dissertation, please email me and I am happy to provide a copy.

Publications

You can find a record of my publications in the usual listings:

• ORCID 0000-0002-8450-9212
• researchmap.jp
• Semantic scholar
• Google scholar

If you do not have access to any of these publications, please feel free to email me to request a copy.

Patents

Patents based on research during my PhD have been submitted or are currently in preparation (to be published here once they are made public by the patent office).

Research groups

Finally, to get a broader view, please do have a look at the varied science happening in the research groups I was or am part of:

• Ota Laboratory (Tokyo) - JSPS Fellowship
• Optofluidics (Cambridge) - PhD
• Knowles Group (Cambridge) - PhD