Welcome
I am a soft matter computational physicist,
and my research is into soft
matter and biological systems.
Soft matter is stuff like molecular liquids, polymers and soaps,
and we and all other living things are made of it, and hence
so is food like the cream buns above,
It is as the name suggest typically soft, and quantum effects
are generally not important.
I also teach students here at Surrey - list of course pages to
the right.
For details of my research, see my
Research page.
I contribute to a
blog. You can see there for slightly random thoughts on science
that I find interesting.
This site uses a template by FreeCSSTemplates. Thanks
to them. The picture above is of a bay in my native south Wales.
Updated by me not very long ago. Am currently working on this ....
I obtained a BSc in Chemical Physics in 1992 at the
University of Sheffield, and then stayed there to do a
PhD in chemistry with George Jackson (now at Imperial).
This was mainly on the statistical mehanics for calculating
phase behaviour. I finished that in 1995 and went to
Amsterdam for two years postdocing with
Bela Mulder and Daan Frenkel (now at Cambridge)
at the
AMOLF lab.
I also worked on phase diagram calculations there too, mostly
on models of colloids.
Then I spent one year in the sun at
UCLA.
in Los Angeles,
working for Bill Gelbart and Jim Heath (now at Caltech).
This was on modelling the self-assembly of Jim's metal nanoparticles
at the water/air interface.
I was appointed here as Lecturer here in 1998, and
I have been here ever since, although I am now a
Senior Lecturer, and so get paid a bit more and have to go to
more meetings.
See my
research page
for my current research interests. What follows
is a very brief outline of the last ten years.
Over the years my resarch into phase transitions has moved to focus
on nucleation (how phase transitions like boiling and freezing start)
and is now mostly focused on understanding how crystals nucleate.
I have also worked on a number of areas of biological physics over the
last ten years. These have including the evolution of protein
interactions, cell signalling, and studies of association and phase
separation in living cells. The connection between these research
areas is inside living cells there is highly complex mixture
of tens of thousands of species of proteins, RNA molecules, etc, and
this mixture can undergo phase transitions. The classic example
of this is cataracts, which form due to a phase-separation-like process
in the cells in the lens of the eye causing domains of varying
refractive index, which then scatter light.
If you would like to get in contact just drop me an email at
r.sear@surrey.ac.uk, or call me on +44(0)1483 686793.
I am a soft matter computational physicist,
and my research is into soft
matter and biological systems.
Soft matter is stuff like molecular liquids, polymers and soaps,
and we and all other living things are made of it, and hence
so is food like the cream buns above,
It is as the name suggest typically soft, and quantum effects
are generally not important.
I also teach students here at Surrey - list of course pages to
the right.
For details of my research, see my
Research page.