Tell us about yourself

I’m Caty Marsden, I'm studying at Loughborough University and I'm in the third year of my PhD now, working between the Chemistry and Materials departments. I do some supramolecular chemistry making gadolinium and terbium complexes, and then l put these into block copolymer particles.

Can you give us an overview of your project?

So, the aim of the project is to make dual imaging systems based on block copolymer particles. We put the terbium and gadolinium complexes into these because gadolinium is useful for MRI imaging as it helps to brighten the image, and then the terbium complexes are useful for optical imaging applications. So that's why we're using those two complexes in our block copolymer particles.

 

How did the seedcorn access help?

The key thing that we were missing at Loughborough was UV detection capability for our GPC. And that would be really useful for us because a big part of the paper that we were working towards, about the block co-polymer particles, was that one hydrophilic monomer we used produced a really broad dispersity. But we didn't believe that it was due to high conversion or something like that - it didn't seem like the chains were terminating each other. And so to prove that, we wanted to be able to investigate that with UV detection, which we don't have in our own lab.

How did you hear about the seedcorn access?

It was from a couple of lecturers in our department. So my supervisor, Helen Willcock and also Fiona Hatton (whose student has also made use of the scheme), I don't know how they came across it, but they just started sending emails around all their PhD students, saying “oh, this could be really useful for us”

How was the application process?

I found it quite simple really. At first I was a bit worried that the application would be difficult, but then I read that you need to get in touch with the relevant person first. So in my case Dan Lester. (Polymer Characterisation RTP Manager)

And once I got in touch with him, he just talked through what things could be useful, what details are needed on the form - I found it quite simple. I wouldn't say it took longer than an hour or two to get it all together.

 

What were the outcomes?

 

The seedcorn work formed part of our paper, which was published in Polymer Chemistry earlier this year (https://doi.org/10.1039/d2py00337f “Crosslinked p(MMA) particles by RAFT emulsion polymerisation: tuning size and stability”)

It was really useful for the paper because if we didn't have that data, the reviewers definitely would’ve asked for it, because it's kind of a proof that we needed. And it was good as well to just compare to the other results, like what we got from our Refractive Index detector. I think you also used a different solvent system to us, so that was a helpful comparison.

The data went in the paper, and I was able to present the work at a couple of conferences. The first was at the WASC event on GPC ("Gel Permeation Celebration - 28th April 2022") and then also at the MacroGroup Young Researchers Meeting in Nottingham where I won an award for Best Oral Presentation. I also presented the work at the AACME Research Day here at Loughborough where I also won an award for my talk.

It was just really nice to have that data to be able to use!

What would you have done without the seedcorn access?

I think without this, we probably would have had to pay another university to run the samples for us. And it was helpful having the back and forth with Dan as well, a few times he ran some samples, and it didn't seem to show up as we expected and we were able to discuss, work through it and figure things out. I think if we'd gone externally to pay for something, they may have just sent the data and gone, “there's your data”, but with Dan were able to get his advice as well.

I even ran the content for the paper as by him as well, just to make sure that I was presenting things in the right way. That was really helpful.