Profile

Well I’m not from the West country originally but my work gave me the opportunity to move down here – I definitely don’t regret it.

I live with my family – wife, and two children, a boy and a girl – in a small town called Frome which is probably best known for cheese. As well as with each other we also share the house with two cats (Officer Dibble – below- and Bagel)

and two guinea pigs (Joella and Lilly): there’s been a lot of animals over the years 🙂

During the summer months we like to grow lots of fruit and veg in the garden and cook lots of tasty stuff from it. Sweetcorn and fresh apple juice from our tree are probably our favourites. Playing football is my favourite pastime and I annoy my family a little bit by watching it and talking about it quite a lot.

Well, I work as a chemist in the R&D department for a big American company who specialise in printing inks for digital printers. You might well have an inkjet printer at home – a HP or Epson maybe – but if you think of a similar type of machine but as big as your living room then that is the kind of printer that I design products for.

After doing the practical work myself for many years I now have a team of lab technicians to do the dirty work for me – and I can assure you that mixing and making ink is messy! It’s my job to make sure that the new inks we make do exactly what our customers need them to do.

There are lots and lots of things you can use inks for, in fact your house or classroom will be full of items that have been printed. Think cereal boxes, drinks cans, wallpaper, floor tiles, even doors and cars!

I’d love to show you what it looks like inside where I work but unfortunately scientific companies can be pretty secretive some times – I couldn’t give away any secrets 🙁

So, if I was actually going into the lab at work I’d drive there for about 8am when I’d swipe in through the security gate with my pass. I’d then head up to the lab to see my team and find out about what experiments they were planning to do that day. If they have any problems and were stuck on what to do next I’d give them some guidance.

Later in the morning I’d get my lab coat on so I could go and do some practical work. It might be mixing some samples of ink, made up of lots of different chemicals. Or it could be doing some tests on printed ink samples, making sure that it wasn’t too sticky or hard, or that it was flexible enough or that it stuck to the right kind of material.

After a break for lunch I might have an afternoon of some Teams/Zoom meetings with customers or suppliers, talking about some of the projects that we are working on together. Before the day is out I’d organise what everyone was going to do tomorrow before the day starts again.