Owen is a PhD student affiliated with Anglia Ruskin University and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he worked as a biopharmaceutical fermentation scientist and food microbiologist and holds an MSc in Food Technology from Wageningen University.
His PhD project focuses on advancing biotechnological approaches to plastic recycling by using enzymes to break down plastics into their constituent monomers, enabling the materials to be reused as feedstock and supporting a circular economy. The research begins with identifying novel enzymes capable of degrading PET plastic, with an emphasis on samples collected from cold environments—an underexplored area that may yield enzymes with desirable properties. The project then moves to recombinant production and kinetic analysis of both known and newly discovered enzymes, employing the Inverse Michaelis-Menten kinetics framework to evaluate their ability to degrade highly crystalline PET, a significant technical challenge in the field. Finally, the study investigates displaying these enzymes, along with others, as synergistic pairs on bacterial spores to potentially enhance their efficiency and sustainability.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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