Jamie is from Birmingham, the third of Britain's great cities and home to some of the country's most useless football teams, one of which is supported by Jamie. Jamie came to Sheffield in 2011 to do an MChem in Chemistry where his performance was rewarded with a first class degree. People of Jamie's ability generally want to do PhDs and Jamie was no different although funding to do one in his “home” department proved a little awkward. He found out I had a position available and contacted me one day before I was holding interviews for the position. Normally I get a couple of good candidates for positions that I have available, but this time I got five excellent candidates, four of whom would have been perfect for the role. Jamie was chosen and started work in October 2015. He is looking at biofilms with Proctor & Gamble and has been working on this project with Ana Morales, who was hired by P&G for a year to help train him, an arrangement that worked splendidly. Jamie's project is part of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Polymers, Soft Matter, and Colloids. It was great that Jamie has an interest in student radio, because it was partly that that kept him in Sheffield. Our student union is the best in the world, and it is nice that Jamie plays a part of it. In the photo above he is showing his participation in the Sheffield "We are International" campaign, which won a Times Higher Education award for the best student strategy (#weareinternational) in November 2014. On Wednesday March 11, 2020 Jamie successfully defended his thesis in front of his examiners, Drs "Mack" Durham (University of Sheffield) and Chris Wright from Swansea University. Jamie is now working for OMERS ventures, which allows him to explore his interest in data science and is employed as lead data engineer. In a world of Excel, his expertise in Python obtained from his PhD (and elsewhere) appealed to them. I cannot comment because I know only C. But that's better than Fortran!
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Polymers, Soft Matter, and Colloids
Publications
A. L. Morales-García, R. Walton, J. T. Blakeman, S. A. Banwart, J. H. Harding, M. Geoghegan, C. L. Freeman, and S. A. Rolfe "The role of extracellular DNA in microbial attachment to oxidized silicon surfaces in the presence of Ca2+ and Na+" Langmuir 37 9838-50 (2021)
A. R. Hall, J. T. Blakeman, A. M. Eissa, P. Chapman, A. L. Morales-García, L. Stennett, O. Martin, E. Giraud, D. H. Dockrell, N. R. Cameron, M. Wiese, L. Yakob, M. E. Rogers, and M. Geoghegan "Glycan-glycan interactions determine Leishmania attachment to the midgut of permissive sand fly vectors" Chem. Sci. 11 10973-83 (2020)
J. T. Blakeman, A. L. Morales-García, J. Mukherjee, K. Gori, A. S. Hayward, N. J. Lant, and M. Geoghegan "Extracellular DNA provides structural integrity to a Micrococcus luteus biofilm" Langmuir 35 6468-75 (2019)
Oral presentations:
ACS Fall meeting, San Diego, USA, August 2019