Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Melanie Britton’s research group is a leader in developing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to visualise chemistry and chemical processes directly. They have used MRI to image chemical patterns in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which allows better understand of the formation of waves and patterns found in slime mould, cell suspensions, nerve axons and cardiac tissues, as well as other autocatalytic chemical reactions. MRI can also visualise flow, and using this method they have been able to better understand how chemistry couples with flow in chemical and biological pattern formation, as well as in chemical reactors. Most recently the group have shown that MRI can be used to probe the composition and structural changes in an electrolyte solution adjacent to a reactive metal during corrosion. These novel experiments demonstrate the enormous potential for MRI to study other electrochemical systems, such as metal-air batteries or fuel cells.