Excited by the wonders of our material world

What do money markets, molecules and magma have in common? A cohort of talented, energetic researchers in physical sciences, as Anthea Lipsett reports.

The widely held view of academics in the physical sciences as a dry bunch, chained to the laboratory bench in white coats doing inexplicable science is a myth that demands to be exploded.

Academics in fields as diverse as volcanology, nanotechnology and computing are doing some of the most interesting, pioneering science anywhere. They are to be found across the UK, striving to push forward the boundaries of their scientific fields and to find explanations for the world around us.

In the final part of our series on who to watch out for in academe, we bring you a handful of the most exciting names in the physical sciences, as suggested by learned societies, subject associations and research funders.

'I like the British system because of its flexibility, and we're encouraged to explore science as a whole'

Andrei Khlobystov

When Andrei Khlobystov arrived at Nottingham University he had a smattering of technical English but could not speak or write the language well. Less than a decade later, the 31-year-old Russian is bilingual, with a number of academic awards to his name and an entry in the Guinness World Records to boot.

Dr Khlobystov's research is in the area of nanomaterials and tiny tubes of carbon atoms known as nanotubes in particular. In 2004, he and colleagues at Oxford University created the smallest "test tubes" known to science.

The team carried out reactions in the tubes, observing the results using an electron microscope.

Carbon nanotubes are 50,000 times thinner than a human hair (the discovery that won the team the Guinness World Record) and it is hoped the technique will be used to create new types of materials.

"I'm trying to advance the understanding of the chemistry of nanotubes so they can be used in many more ways," Dr Khlobystov says. "They are referred to as the materials of the 21st century because they were developed and discovered in the past 10 to 15 years."

The chemistry is still being developed and Dr Khlobystov particularly enjoys being a pioneer in a new area of science.

After completing his MSc at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, he did a PhD at Nottingham. A postdoctoral research stint in materials science at Oxford University followed before he returned to Nottingham in 2004 on a Leverhulme Trust early career fellowship.

Last year, he won a university research fellowship from the Royal Society, and this year he won an European Young Investigator Award.

"My independent research career has been in the UK but I still stay in touch with my old lab and teachers. I like the British academic system, not just because of the funding but because of its flexibility and the fact that we're encouraged to be interdisciplinary and to explore science as a whole, not just our own narrow topic."

The Russian system is more compartmentalised, he says. "People could study one type of molecule for their whole life, which is good too, but I like the mix."

Dr Khlobystov also appreciates the UK system's focus on how research will be applied. "All the projects I have been involved in are driven by application. There's always some idea about how we can use the product or structure, even with blue-skies research."

'One of the things about geology is we can't decide what experiments we want to play with the Earth'

David Pyle

The rather dry title of "university lecturer in igneous processes" bears little relation to how exciting David Pyle's job is.

As one of the UK's leading volcanologists - he has just been poached from Cambridge University by Oxford University - he spends his time scaling volcanoes all over the world and trawling library archives to work out what makes them behave the way they do.

"I try to understand patterns of behaviour of volcanoes and what that can tell us about how volcanoes work," the 41-year-old explains.

"There's an extremely good archive of very detailed written records of eruptions from 100 to 150 years ago that are forgotten about.

"I enjoy delving back into the archives, and we are now in a position to reinterpret data with the benefit of hindsight," says Dr Pyle.

It was a field trip to Montserrat to watch a total solar eclipse and an active volcano at the same time, combined with research from past volcano activity, that led to his key finding that the seasons can affect volcanic behaviour.

"The volcano was going into a fairly quiet phase of activity and we weren't sure that anything would happen as a consequence of the eclipse.

"Nothing did, at the time, but then a student looked at the number of volcanic eruptions over the past 300 years and when they started. From that we found out that there's a distinct season of eruptions."

There are 20 per cent more eruptions worldwide when it is winter in the northern hemisphere (between September and March) than when it is summer.

"Globally, the Earth changes shape as the seasons change, and this gentle changing of the surface of the planet is seen as a response by volcanoes with magma close to the surface waiting to erupt," Dr Pyle says.

He enjoys the mix of field work and more scholarly work in academic life in general and his subject in particular.

"I like the sheer variety of things you can get involved in," he explains.

"On the research side, there are times when you don't know what's going to happen next.

"For me, working in geology, and with volcanoes in particular, the nice thing is when you get the opportunity to visit a volcano that hasn't been visited for a while, or try out a new piece of equipment, or see an event you hadn't anticipated. It challenges you to think differently."

But devising experiments in volcanology has complications that other physical science subjects do not face.

"One of the things about geology is that we can't decide what experiments we want to play with the Earth in the same way that you could do as a laboratory chemist.

"But you can say you want to understand this pattern or activity, or this general phenomenon of volcanoes, and then pick your field site to look at that," he says.

Dr Pyle hopes that his position at Oxford will lead him in new research directions in working with the other geologists there - and even collaborating with archeological scientists to help date archaeological sites by the volcanic ash found at them.

But he also enjoys teaching, and was awarded the Pilkington Teaching Prize at Cambridge.

"One of the pleasures of teaching to small groups of first-year students is that they can ask you the most blindingly obvious questions that you might never have thought of," he says.

"It's very refreshing. They come in with strong backgrounds in physics, chemistry and biology, but they know nothing about the Earth, and you want to try to excite them to the possibility of what you can tell them about the Earth from simple observations and deductions."

'I thought what I'd observed must be coincidence, but then realised it was telling us something interesting'

Carol Robinson

At 50, Carol Robinson is not young, even in academic terms, but she has risen phenomenally quickly in the field of chemistry since returning from an eight-year career break to raise a family.

Now a professor at Cambridge University heading a research group of 20, she has more than caught up with the PhD peers she felt she had fallen behind while bringing up her three children. "I never thought in my wildest dreams that I could be in the position I am now in," she says.

Professor Robinson gave up a postdoctoral research assistant position and returned to a junior post at Oxford University, almost starting her career again from scratch.

"I had lost a lot of confidence, and talking at conferences was hard because I was used to coffee mornings and being with my children," she says.

"Computers had come in while I was away. You didn't have a PC on your desk when I was doing my PhD, so it was quite embarrassing having to learn how to use one. The computer would beep away and people would look at me strangely."

She fought hard to catch up, getting up early to leave in time to pick up her children from school, then working into the night after they had gone to bed.

"I felt I had to prove myself and work harder than anybody else," she explains.

This hard work, and what she describes as "luck", led to her research success.

"I was doing some experiments and observed molecules sticking together that I wasn't expecting to. I thought it must be an accident or coincidence, but then I realised this was telling us something interesting about the molecules."

Now her goal is to further this research and decipher a network of proteins using mass spectometry to see which proteins interact with which. This will provide clues about how the proteins function in living cells.

The flexibility of academe makes it a good environment for women to work in. "I never missed a sports day because I knew I could work in the evening if I needed to catch up," Professor Robinson says.

"The UK is much more family- friendly. It's much harder for colleagues in the US."

'You can be three or 70 years old and just as much of an expert on a material. It's about how you relate to it'

Mark Miodownik

Mark Miodownik's ambition is to collect every material in the world, an "insanely impossible" feat, he says.

The 37-year-old lecturer in mechanical engineering at King's College London created the world's first materials library, prompting the establishment of several more - in Paris, Berlin, Milan and the Netherlands.

"It's quite nice to see them all springing up, but I'm the only one doing it in a science department," he says.

"You wouldn't believe it, but there just aren't any in science departments and yet materials are an important part of our cultural heritage. Each new material creates a cultural revolution."

Dr Miodownik established the library partly with funding from his National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts fellowship.

"Materials are everywhere, so people ignore them, but just as a flower has complexity at every different scale - which enhances its beauty - the same is true of a piece of steel girding. You can't see it, so people aren't aware of the crystals inside it that are changing all the time," Dr Miodownik explains.

It is as important for materials scientists to have physical materials around them as it is to have access to journals and books, he contends.

"I'm very keen on the fact that materials embody our knowledge of the material world. A material is a kind of manifestation of human desire or need," he says.

The library sits in Dr Miodownik's lab, not because it will give him a new theory or push science forward, but because it is key to explaining what he does - the role of universities, he says.

"When people handle materials, it brings out their knowledge in a really charming way. You can be three or 70 years old and just as much of an expert on a material. It's about how you relate to it."

But the library is a sideline. Dr Miodownik's research is on the "next big question" in physics.

"The crystal structures of metals self-organise under high temperatures. We showed biologists computer simulations of what goes on and the crystal structures look like cells," he says.

"If you cut open a pomegranate, each pip is a crystal. Some grow, others shrink. Beautiful physics determines that. We're asking if you can take the physics of looking at metals and apply it to biological systems to understand how embryos develop.

"There seems to be a set of physical principles to cell organisation, but biology uses it in a different way and maybe more cleverly," Dr Miodownik adds.

"The human genome has been sequenced, but people don't understand how something as complex as humans can be coded with so few genes.

"We want to know what that information is doing. Is it really a bit-by-bit programme, or is it doing something altogether more sophisticated than that - harnessing natural self-organising principles that are already there?"

'The computing field is never boring . I'm fortunate to be paid for what I don't feel is work'

Dave Cliff

Ten days after rejoining the academic fold - to direct a £14 million research programme at Southampton University - Dave Cliff's building burnt to the ground.

But the 2005 fire that destroyed Southampton's computer science unit didn't deter the 40-year-old professor of computing, who seeks to have as much fun as possible in his professional life.

For the past eight years this has meant working on "real" problems in the City. "You can end up working on illusory problems (in academe) and I wanted to work at the applied end," he explains.

"I felt I hadn't done stuff that really mattered, and in industry you know about that really quickly - your (computer) program's trading and making money or losing money. If it's losing money, you need to fix it very quickly."

A computer program he wrote while doing consultancy work for Hewlett Packard as an academic at Sussex University serves as a highly successful example of this applied work.

Professor Cliff supplemented his academic salary by trading on the futures exchange. An algorithm he "cobbled together" to win a bet - that you don't need intelligence to be a trader - ended up bettering the efforts of real traders.

After the results were published by Sussex, IBM picked them up - and they are now used as a standard tool in the City, to no financial gain for Professor Cliff.

"A large number of millions of dollars go through my algorithm every day, which makes me smile even though I still have a mortgage," he quips.

Professor Cliff was careful to maintain close links with academe during his commercial stint. "It was really good fun in industry, but I'd always secretly planned to return (to academe) when the time was right," he says.

"I'm glad I spent the years there because I learnt an awful lot, but it's good to have academic freedom again and to pursue research that is not governed by the bottom line of the company you're working for," he adds.

Southampton is explicitly entrepreneurial, and it actively encourages Professor Cliff to be involved in new companies and consultancy work.

It is this "portfolio" nature of academe, and computing in particular, that appeals to him.

He says: "There wasn't one thing I got hooked on at 18. I switch from one field to another; I like that ability to take control of my career and reinvent myself as opportunity or interest arises," he says.

His new post gives him the opportunity to set up his own research group and to look into the research that needs to be done on the IT problems that will arise as computer capacity increases and they get more complicated.

"That's a really interesting challenge and the kind of opportunity that doesn't arise that often," he says.

"I feel extraordinarily lucky working in the (computing) field because it's never boring," he says. "Every time I feel I'm stagnating, something comes totally out of the blue and changes it. It keeps me happy. I'm fortunate to be paid for what I don't feel is work."