Profile

Hello, I’m Bee! I live in St Andrews in Fife and I have a cat called Inky. My preferred pronouns are they/them. I love cooking vegetarian food.

I am studying to become Dr Hockin – to do this I am working as a researcher on a topic in chemistry, supervised by a professor in the chemistry department. On a daily basis I do chemistry experiments and then write about them. Here is a picture of me in the lab, wearing goggles to protect my eyes of course. I make lots of cool brightly coloured chemicals, some of them even glow in the dark!

I am working towards a PhD in Chemistry at the University of St Andrews; I do research about making chemical reactions happen using sunlight, and run experiments to make new chemicals. I also have a job teaching undergraduate university students practical chemistry. I make lots of very pretty glowing molecules and then use them like antennae to direct light energy into chemical reactions; this speeds up the chemical reaction that wouldn’t otherwise happen without the energy from light.

Here are some crystals I grew earlier…

Lots of the chemicals that I make glow in the dark – these ones are especially cool!

During my work as a PhD student, I decide which hours I work, so usually I’ll come into my office at 9am (if I’m tired it might end up being 9.30am…) I’ll answer a lot of emails and then start doing experiments in the morning. The experiments I do usually take a few hours so I can set them up and then go and have lunch! I also write computer code so that we can predict what molecules will look like and how they will behave before we make them. This is useful because it means we can compare the predicted properties of the molecule with what they actually do!

I teach classes of undergraduates as a separate job to my PhD, usually for 3 days a week. My class has between 60 and 90 students in a big teaching laboratory where the students learn how to run experiments. I’m there to help them out with setting things up, helping fix things when they go wrong, and answering any questions that the students have about the chemical reactions they’re doing. I’m not all alone when I do this, there’s usually two or three other teachers walking around the lab because the class is so big, and the teachers all wear bright green lab coats so it’s easy to spot us when we’re wandering around the lab (all the students wear white ones) I really enjoy teaching and helping students understand chemistry! It’s a very tiring job though because I’m standing up and walking around all day, sometimes I find I haven’t sat down for 4 hours…

A big part of my job is presenting my research to all kinds of audiences – here I am presenting at the Three Minute Thesis competition in 2018, where I won 2nd place.

Lots of the molecules that I make glow in the dark.

This is a chemical reaction taking place under flow conditions, where the chemicals pass through tubes while we shine a light on them.

I would use the prize money to bring groups of school students of all ages to visit the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews. Class groups could visit a working research laboratory for a tour and find out what scientists do all day, see some fun science demonstrations and try doing some real experiments themselves. Last year I ran an activity exactly like this for 90 students in Primary 6/7 (ages 9-11) and it was so much fun! We made bottle rockets, liquid nitrogen ice cream and glowsticks (and a lot of mess…)