“The more you learn about the world, the more interesting the questions you ask become…"
Tom's interest in science grew from his excitement of watching Halley's Comet reach Earth's vicinity through his binoculars at just six years old. “I vividly remember seeing the live footage of the encounter on TV and I am very much looking forward to seeing the comet again in 2061,"he says.
The more he learned about atoms and molecules in school and how they behaved, the more fascinating he found the subject. This led him to study chemistry at Durham University and furthermore, complete a PhD in Computational Chemistry. He enjoys researching chemistry through computers as he can 'look at what is happening on a level of detail that experiments cannot see'.
He joined STFC 13 years ago and now leads a team of scientists in the Scientific Computing Department (SCD), developing computational methods for studying complex chemical systems, ranging from bacterial proteins to materials used in industrial scale chemical production. The team has created a software package called ChemShell, used to run simulations on high performance computers with thousands of processors. In this development work, the team collaborates with other scientists from around the world.
Tom has no doubt that the best part of his role is the 'sheer variety of the work'. He and his team are working on many other projects, tackling all aspects of computational chemistry including fundamental software, algorithm development and scientific applications. They recently began a project enabling materials and molecular simulations on future exascale computers (running one quintillion mathematical operations a second) and another to harness the power of the emerging field of quantum computing, which will become more and more important to scientific computing as the technology develops.
On the science side, they are working towards creating new methods to simulate advanced chemical catalysts, including improved treatments of solvation, spectroscopy and reactivity, and developing combined computational and experimental approaches to engineer new enzymes to change the chemical reactions that they take part in.
Tom believes the work his team carries out in catalysis is massively important to the world economy as it is estimated that 85% of all products that are manufactured globally use catalysis at some point during their production chain. Improvements in this field will have a huge impact and benefit a wide range of other industries, including energy materials and healthcare (pharmaceutical development). In a world that is aiming for net zero, Tom believes lots of processes must be transformed in various economic sectors, and catalysis research is key in achieving this.
To maintain a healthy work–life balance, Tom is now working part time as he has a young family. Maintaining this balance is important to Tom, although he finds it challenging at times. He says, “It's not always easy, especially as my responsibilities have increased." Tom is thankful for the invaluable extended paternity leave which he was able to take when both of his children were born, an opportunity he would recommend to all parents.
Eager to become an astronomer from a young age, and Quantum Leap being one of his favourite television shows as a child, Tom encourages the young people of today to continue to learn, be curious, and ask questions. He says, ''The more you learn about the world, the more interesting the questions you can ask become, and the more you realise you still need to learn before you understand anything…If you end up in a scientific job, your mind will be blown regularly, guaranteed!''
