my research background

I sometimes find it hard to describe my research in a nutshell, as I’m drawn to different academic fields. I tend to look at research questions through different disciplinary perspectives and love exploring resonances across those boundaries. I feel this helps me make better sense of the world.

My research interests are shaped by my lived experience, and often emerge from serendipitous encounters and some accidental rabbit holes, some of which quickly become obsessions! I draw inspiration from several people, places and things in my life- my family, my late father’s work on epistemology, Akan indigenous knowledge and pedagogies. I find I learn so much from trying to see the world through my children’s eyes… if that’s possible… I’m especially inspired by their art, they teach me a lot by what they make with random things and stuff… Like this portrait of Tortoise in Tinga Tinga Tales by my then three-year old…

I am a keen microscopist, and love working with X-ray tomography to observe and map material change both spatially and temporally, in three-dimensional space and at different length scales. I look for clues and explore the stories that the inner worlds of materials can tell us about how they have lived their lives. You can find examples of this in papers here and here. I have specific expertise in developing and deploying multimodal materials characterisation workflows to integrate stories about the same material told by different probing methods. I am excited by how this approach often expands meaning and facilitates emergence.

some materials i’ve worked on…

In no particular order…

thermoplastic elastomer gels, synthetic marble, power plant steel pipe welds, shaped-metal-deposited aerospace alloys, solder alloys, power electronics interconnect materials like sintered nano-silver, ultrasonically bonded aluminium and copper interconnects, sound, and of course, paper (one of my favorites)…