Could you imagine a planet in which water is replaced with a mixture of choline chloride and urea? That does not sound too feasible but here is Oli to make you change your mind.

After getting his MSci in Chemistry from the University of Bristol and working on surfactant behaviour in aqueous solution for master’s project, he thought that water was way too boring and decided to try something new Deep eutectic solvents are the focus of his PhD project. He therefore studied the structure of these solvents and what makes them so special, using neutron diffraction experiments. Also he studied the behaviour of surfactants and the formation of rather weird inorganic nanostructured materials.

Prof. Karen Edler was aided by Dr Daniel Bowron (ISIS), Dr Salvador Eslava (Bath), Dr Laura Torrente-Murciano (Cambridge) in looking after Oli.

With a world record of several months for fitting the same dataset, he has shown that there are more exciting things than water.

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