Scratching the Surface of Material Science

In this talk I will tell the story of my team's discovery of a novel class of biomaterials resistant to bacterial colonisation and biofilm formation from the conception of the initial idea, through to them reaching the clinic and very recent generation of early clinical efficacy results. In the talk I will aim to highlight aspects of the high throughput discovery approach we took, the lessons that can be learned about the many challenges of taking candidate biomaterials from the lab to the clinic.

At the core of our ability to manipulate matter at the single atom (or molecule) level is a microscope like no other; without lenses, or mirrors, or indeed optics of any type, the scanning probe microscope (SPM) allows us to not only see single atoms but to prod, push, poke, pull, and play with them, building nanostructures from the basic building blocks of matter. I’ll discuss just how SPMs are being integrated with artificial intelligence techniques to revolutionise how we image and modify matter at the atomic and molecular levels.

3D Printing has been around for a while. Although the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the term will be plastic funky parts, it is actually possible to 3D print parts from most metals to go into cars, planes, and more. There are lots of technologies out there that can print metals but they have their limitations in terms of the materials they can handle and how complex are the structures that they can fabricate. In this talk, you will hear about a world’s first in printing high temperature metals using a novel approach, exclusively available at the University of Nottingham.