Profile

I was born and raised in Italy, I completed most of my education there. I moved to Oxfordshire in 2006 for a job at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and I haven’t tried anywhere else yet! My husband is a chemist and makes great pizza. He is also Italian, but we have met in the UK, over a cup of espresso coffee. I have two bilingual children, a 7 yo boy and a 5 yo girl. In our spare time we love having friends around.

I use neutrons to look at hydrogen bonds in liquids, and it gets particularly interesting when water is involved.

I am physicist who does a chemist’s job:

‘This is one of the most fantastic pieces of detective work that has ever been done – organic chemistry… The physicist could never quite believe that the chemist knew what he was talking about when he described the arrangement of the atoms. For about twenty years it has been possible, in some cases, to look at such molecules by a physical method, and it has been possible to locate every atom, not by looking at colors, but by measuring where they are. And lo and behold!, the chemists are almost always correct.’ Richard Feynman

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/speaking-of-chemistry/9085.article

In one of my recent works, I studied why sugar is sweet:

www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Neutrons-reveal-secret-to-sweetness.aspx

The short answer is: because of hydrogen bond with water molecules. We are about to publish a paper with a provisional title: “The sweeter, the wetter!”. Yes, it could definitely be better. Maybe you can help me think of a better title for it?

My friend and colleague Sylvia McLain explaining the interaction of water with proteins:

Protein folding and particle accelerators: a new solution:

An instruments scientist is a scientist who has responsibility for an instrument, so in addition to doing science, I look after this machine from the technical point of view (with a team of expert technicians to support me) and from the scientific point of view. This means I advertise the instrument capabilities, invite people to use it, help them devising their experiment and performing it and understanding the results and writing a paper about it (there is always a paper at the end of scientific project… well, almost always!). My instrument is called SANDALS (I know! I didn’t get to pick the name!) and it is bigger than me 🙂 It sits in a room on its own because it gets radioactive and I load my samples (the things I want to study) using a crane (see photo below). I guess the crane is the part I like best. 🙂

I like being an instrument scientist because I like to help people, I like to talk to them and understand their (scientific) problem and how to go about solving it. I like to meet people from all over the world.