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Biography

Professional biography

Dr Kate Nixon graduated from Flinders University (Australia) with a B.Tech (Forensic and Analytical Chemistry) and B.Sc (Honours) before undertaking her PhD in Electron Momentum Spectroscopy. She has been a researcher within the Photon Science Institute at the University of Manchester as a Royal Society Newton Fellow and Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow and at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (Brazil). Dr Nixon spent 4 years at the University of Wolverhampton as a lecturer in physical chemistry beefore joining the Open University.

Research interests

Dr Nixon’s research focuses on electron collisions with atoms and molecules. Applications of this research include aiding understanding of cancer treatments by radiotherapy and optimising the yield of second generation biofuels.

Projects

Electronic Structure Measurements and Calculations of Halo-Substituted Nitroimidazole Radiosensitizers

Cancer is a disease that spans the breadth of human existence and is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly 1 million deaths in 2020 [ref]. In a world where the population is increasing and aging [ref], a global scientific priority is to develop effective and low-cost cancer treatments with widespread access. Radiotherapy is a well-established cost-efficient cancer treatment and, either alone or paired with other options such as surgery or chemotherapy, is a mainstay of cancer therapy. The goal of curative radiotherapy is to kill the tumour cells, however, radiation dose is limited by the need to protect non-cancer tissues in close proximity to the tumour. Radiosensitizing agents can be used to enhance radiation-driven death of the targeted cancer cells while minimizing damage to healthy tissue. There is an urgent call for the discovery and implementation of new, efficient radiosensitizers. Given the extremely lengthy process to take a molecule from ‘bench to bedside’[ref], it is desirable to study potential compounds in silico to characterise the properties and behaviours that lead to radiosensitivity. As quantum chemical calculations increase in sophistication, it becomes increasingly important to carefully evaluate these, through the most direct and sensitive experimental measurements possible, to ensure properties predicted by such calculations are reliable. Electron momentum spectroscopy (EMS) measures the closest observable to the wavefunction and provides a means to perform a stringent evaluation of the quality of such calculations.

Laser-Based Thermal Desorption of Biomolecules for Electron Scattering Experiments

• To implement a new experimental programme in order to investigate the electronic structure of thermally labile biomolecules • To develop a new technique to achieve target beams of in-tact nucleobases to allow electron scattering measurements from these molecules for the first time • To deliver accurate data for evaluation of quantum chemical models that describe the physico-chemical properties of molecules.

Publications

Journal Article

A Cocurricular Context-Based Enrichment Program to Enhance Scientific Skills Development (2024)

Effect of Radical Copolymerization of the (Oxa)norbornene End-group of RAFT-prepared Macromonomers on Bottlebrush Copolymer Synthesis via ROMP (2022)

Thermal desorption effects on fragment ion production from multi-photon ionized uridine and selected analogues (2021)

Electron impact ionization and fragmentation of biofuels (2020)

Comparison of experiment and theory for superelastic electron-collision studies from laser-aligned magnesium (2018)

Electron impact ionization of 1-butanol: II. Total ionization cross sections and appearance energies (2018)

Electron impact ionization of 1-butanol: I. Mass spectra and partial ionization cross sections (2018)

Natural & unnatural-parity contributions in electron-impact ionization of laser-aligned atoms (2017)

Electron impact ionization of 1-propanol (2017)

Sulphur hexaflouride: low energy (e,2e) experiments and molecular three-body distorted wave theory (2016)

Electron impact ionisation and fragmentation of methanol and ethanol (2016)

Electron- and photon-impact ionization of furfural (2015)

Comparison of experimental and theoretical electron-impact-ionization triple-differential cross sections for ethane (2015)

Intermediate energy cross sections for electron-impact vibrational-excitation of pyrimidine (2015)

Evidence for unnatural-parity contributions to electron-impact ionization of laser-aligned atoms (2015)

Intermediate energy electron impact excitation of composite vibrational modes in phenol (2015)

Differential cross sections for electron impact excitation of the electronic bands of phenol (2015)

Theoretical and experimental(e,2e)study of electron-impact ionization of laser-aligned Mg atoms (2014)

Parametrization of Electron-Impact Ionization Cross Sections from Laser-Excited and Aligned Atoms (2014)

Triply differential (e,2e) studies of phenol (2014)