Meet the team

Simon Hanna (Director of BriSC)

Simon’s primary research interest is in the physics of holographic optical tweezers and their applications in nanoscience. This work forms part of the Dynamic Holographic Assembler project.

Simon is also interested in molecular nanophysics. In collaboration with other members of the Nanophysics and Soft Matter group, he studies image formation in the atomic force microscope (AFM) and single molecule force-spectroscopy. He also studies self-assembling molecular nanostructures through molecular modeling techniques including Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations. Simon has also co-authored a book on Liquid Crystalline Polymers.

Natalie Fey (Deputy Director of BriSC, Associate Professor in Chemistry)

Natalie is a computational chemist based in the School of Chemistry. Her main research focus is on the computational study of organometallic catalysts, aimed at improving our understanding of the mechanism of catalytic reactions and developing approaches for the screening and optimisation of novel catalysts. She also supports a wide range of projects applying computational mechanistic study and data-led prediction to chemical synthesis. She is the programme director for the Chemistry with Scientific Computing degrees and a member of Chemistry’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee, as well as the school’s Athena SWAN Action Team. She specialises in outreach and public engagement of women with STEM subjects and edits the Picture It… Chemistry blog.

When she is not puzzling out reaction mechanisms, she is a keen gardener and plantswoman, a passable baker, a maker of crochet molecules, a stranded sailor and an inadequate servant to her dogs, Molly and Ozzy.

Matt Rigby (BriSC Academic Lead)

Matt is an atmospheric scientist in the School of Chemistry. In his research, he develops and uses models of the atmosphere to explain how and why concentrations of greenhouse gases are changing. He is a member of the international Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), which tracks changes in levels of ozone depleting substances. He leads the UK-wide Detection and Attribution of Regional greenhouse gas Emissions project (DARE-UK), which is developing new atmospheric measurement techniques to better quantify the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Rachel Tunnicliffe (BriSC Senior Lecturer, MSc Programme Director)

Rachel began her career in astrophysics, using software to study massive violent explosions in the distant universe and making use state-of-the art observatory facilities. Her research interests are now somewhat closer to home and she studies emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases, using inversion techniques to determine the sources of these measured emissions. Most recently, she has been investigating Brazil’s contributions to the methane emissions budget including from the Amazon basin, forest fires and man-made emissions including cattle farming.

She has also been involved in development of a cloud platform for visualisation and analysis of greenhouse gas data, the HUGS project now onto into second phase as OpenGHG. She has a keen interest in software sustainability practices and is eager to ensure that scientific software is built with an eye on testing and reliability.

Andrew McCluskey (BriSC Lecturer)

Originally from Glasgow, Andrew studied and worked in Edinburgh, Connecticut, Bath, Oxford, and Copenhagen before joining Bristol in August 2023. There he leads the SCAMs@bristol research group. The research aim of the SCAMs@bristol group is to develop powerful analysis methods for data from experiments and simulations, by including what we already know about the world — some may call this physics-informed modelling. These methods make use of cutting-edge tools developed in the data science community to ensure the maximum information is obtained from the measurement.

We believe that the next generation of data analysis will be built on an understanding of the fundamental chemistry and physics of the systems of interest.