Background
Born and raised in the outskirts of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, I came to Oxford as an undergraduate chemist following A-levels at my local comprehensive. After my part II project looking at patterns formed by superparamagnetic colloidal particles with Prof Roel Dullens, I proceeded to complete a DPhil on the Synthetic Biology CDT. Here I was exposed to an (extremely) broad range of research topics - I saw life beyond physical chemistry. My substantive DPhil project, hosted in the Oxford Biochemistry department, with Dr TJ Nott and Dirk focused on the coming together of disordered proteins to form dense liquids. Having seen life beyond physical chemistry, I decided to return, and am fortunate to continue working with Dirk.
Research Interests
Broadly intersted in hierarchical structure and, more recently, understanding off-equilibrium systems. I still find great joy in building a molecular picture of the world, particularly focusing on how chemical structure imposes meso and macroscale structure and functionality in soft systems. Furthermore, I've a soft-spot for living systems, and a little bit obsessed (and amazed) by the fact that living systems comprise atoms drawn from a relatively small portion of the periodic table. That my body is able to perform the chemistry required to turn a burger into an enormously complex, coupled network of chemical processes which span (at least) 10 orders of magnitude on the spatiotemporal scale, is completely mind-boggling.
Expertise
practical: confocal/brightfield/FLIM microscopy, protein purification from bacterial cell culture, programming, image analysis
theory: statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, (some) fluid mechanics, protein science, colloid science, physics of polymers and interfaces
Publications
Holland, J., Castrejón-Pita, A.A., Tuinier, R., Aarts, D.G. and Nott, T.J., 2023. Surface tension measurement and calculation of model biomolecular condensates. Soft Matter. 10.1039/D3SM00820G
