William did his PhD with Nick Williams and me making polymers for one-stop switchable adhesion applications. He is part of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Molecular Scale Engineering. He was born in Lincolnshire and studied for his undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Leicester from 2008 to 2012. This was quite cool, because he took an industrial placement in 2010 with the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), where he was put in the Analysis Team of the Tritium Technology Group. Actually, they wanted military tactics from him, because they found out he’s one of those people who do military reenactments of historical battles, where the English beat the French. He joined the centre for doctoral training in molecular-scale engineering in 2012 and, started the full time research project a year later, having already done a rotation in Nick's lab. Anyway, he then worked on developing and evaluating an environmentally reversible adhesive that can simply be applied to relevant surfaces in one coating. This is nice, because it involves attaching environmentally reversible polymers to modified supramolecular calix[4]resorcinarenes. On February 19, 2018 William defended his thesis before his examiners, Dr Victor Chechik of the University of York and Professor Graham Leggett, who was the University of Sheffield internal examiner, and, after having made the requested corrections tohis thesis, he was awarded his at the ceremony on July 16, 2019. William has now joined the power transmission fluids team at Infineum, a company which also employs Sarah Canning!
Graham Leggett's research group
Victor Chechik's research group
Publications
W. D. Seddon, L. Alfhaid, A. D. F. Dunbar, M. Geoghegan, and N. H. Williams "Adhesion of grafted-to polyelectrolyte brushes functionalized with calix[4]resorcinarene and deposited as a monolayer Langmuir 36 13843-52 (2020)
L. Alfhaid, R. La Spina, M. R. Tomlinson, A. R. Hall, W. D. Seddon, N. H. Williams, F. Cousin, S. Gorb, and M. Geoghegan "Adhesion between oppositely charged polyelectrolytes" J. Adhes. 94 58-76 (2018)
L. Alfhaid, W. D. Seddon, N. H. Williams, and M. Geoghegan "Double-network hydrogels improve pH-switchable adhesion" Soft Matter 12 5022-8 (2016)