Manchester NMR Methodology Group

Graduate Student

Research
New NMR Tools for Impurity Analysis

Biography
I graduated with a 1st Class Honours degree and was awarded an ‘Academic Endeavour Prize’ in chemistry which included a year’s industrial placement at the University of Manchester’s Imaging Centre (WMIC). This is a cancer research centre, which focuses on both clinical and pre-clinical Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). My final year project was based at the WMIC under the supervision of Dr. Adam McMahon and involved the design of a microfluidic reactor for the use in PET tracer chemistry.

After my degree I stayed at Manchester Metropolitan University and worked as a researcher in the area of computational chemistry. My project involved the design of novel fullerene derivatives to increase bioavailability and inhibit the HIV-1protease protein, using Scigress modelling package, a genetic FastDock program and Linux system.

After leaving academic study I worked on a short R & D project to develop a new dye for use in the automotive industry. I then turned my attention to the pharmaceutical industry where I worked as a QC Analyst for various companies including the NHS Trust. My Ph.D sets out to develop new, and improve, NMR methods for detecting and characterising low-level impurities (down to the 0.1% level) in pharmaceutical products and intermediates. Development of new drugs in the pharmaceutical industry has required exhaustive separation and purification to identify many impurities. New developments in NMR have made it an increasingly powerful tool for studying mixtures directly; for structural analysis intact mixtures robust even at high dynamic range, are to be used. Techniques include pure-shift NMR and diffusion-ordered spectroscopy.

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