Profile

I am still quite new to Bristol as I moved here in January. Before I was in London where I spent most of my time in the UK. Sometimes I liked it 😊 and sometimes I hated it ☹. But I liked Bristol as soon as I arrived. My past as a wall painting conservator (a quite unusual job!) has allowed me to travel and work in wonderful places such as Buddhist monasteries in Bhutan 🇧🇹, desert grottoes in China 🇨🇳, orthodox churches in Georgia 🇬🇪, and royal palaces in India 🇮🇳. I had wonderful adventures, once I even squared off with a monkey 🐒who was trying to steal our camera kit!

My family and my friends 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 are the most important thing in my life. I love spending time with them while trying out new restaurants 🍜 and bars 🍸. I also love cats 🐈 and can’t wait to have one. I like to travel 🧳 and to meet new people and discover places and cultures. Sometimes I really enjoy cooking and I will try a lot of new and different things, and sometimes I will not want to cook at all.

Paintings 🖼are very precious objects that tell stories about our history and culture, and the human ability to create beautiful things. They can be found in museums, but also painted on the walls of churches ⛪ and buildings 🏯. Paintings are very interesting objects to study, made up of a lot of different ingredients. I study the organic ingredients such as some pigments (which give colour 🎨), and binders (which hold the pigments together- these can be egg 🥚, oil 🪔, milk 🥛 or animal glue 🐄). I study these materials by looking at their molecules with special machines. Molecules (think of them as ‘pieces’, like in Lego), are very very small and we can’t see them with our eyes. The organic ingredients in paintings are difficult to study because their molecules look very similar, and because they are very fragile. Paintings can be very old , and organic materials have either disappeared or changed. It is important to know what organic materials are in a painting because then we can understand how it was made, and we can better preserve it for the future. This is called conservation. A conservator is like a doctor 👩‍⚕️– it is the person who makes sure paintings live as long as possible. They need to know what is in a painting so they can treat it without damaging it.

I study (or analyse) organic materials using mass spectrometry, or MS, with specialist machines which only need a very small sample (a piece used for the analysis of a material). MS is able to break apart molecules into smaller fragments (or pieces). Molecules that are the same will always break apart in the same way. So, by looking at the result of MS analysis, we can recognize molecules even if we can’t see them. I am trying to find out if new MS machines can give us more information than the more traditional ones.

A MS machine that I use in my lab

One of the materials that I’m looking at now is cochineal dye. This is a red colorant that comes from cochineal insects 🐞 and that fades with time. It is also used a lot in food, so if you see E120 as an ingredient, that is cochineal! If you like ketchup or jelly beans you have probably eaten it!

Dried cochineal insects, used to make a red pigment 🎨. It was used to paint the pink coat of the man in the painting below. It would have originally looked much brighter red 🔴 but it has now faded.

Thomas Gainsborough, Dr. Ralph Schomberg, c. 1770, National Gallery (NG684)

When I go to the lab I wake up earlier than if I’m working from home. If I have time I will have a relaxed breakfast 🥞– I like to take my time to prepare for the day. I always need coffee ☕ when I wake up, with a lot of milk! When I get to the lab (I try to be there by 8) I start the instrument I am using that day and let it run a blank. This means I let it work without a sample, and when it is finished I check the results to make sure the instrument is ‘clean’ – there are no unwanted chemicals in there. I can then analyse my sample and be sure that everything I see in my results comes from what I put inside the machine!

Analysing one sample takes at least one hour, so there is a lot of waiting time ⏳. While I am waiting I prepare other samples in the lab 🧪 or work on my computer at my desk 💻. I like to have chats with colleagues that are around and have a mid-morning coffee break ☕. On my computer I could be doing anything from writing reports ✍, preparing presentations, answering emails 📧, having meetings, watching seminars or online conferences. Sometimes I draw molecules and chemical reactions which I find very fun.

Sometimes I get to go to London and spend time in the scientific department at the National Gallery 🖼, where I select materials to study from their collection. I also get to use their MS machine, to work together with my supervisor there, and to observe his work analysing real paintings. This is always really exciting! Eventually I will be able to take a sample from a real painting to analyse it, but it’s still too early in my research for that.