Dr Rob Barker, Lecturer in Chemistry and Forensics, School of Physical Sciences

>>So my research sits at the interface between physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. At its core it's about developing new techniques in order to understand nature. This comes from looking at nature at the very, very small level, from a nano scale up, to a full system-wide scale of understanding, and the reason we do that is in order to design new materials, new manufacturing processes, taking what nature does so well, using intelligent chemistry and integration of lots of different techniques in order to develop something which has an impact on human nature,  on the world around us. 
>>One of these things we were saying … we were talking about looking at techniques to develop and understand nature, particularly understanding the biophysics of infection, so understanding … using physics and chemistry, understand biology and actually understand how ourselves become infected. So what we do is we develop models of cell membranes of myelin sheaths that we have in our nerve endings all the way through to skin and we take these to large-scale facilities that  we only have ... in the UK we have two of these facilities - and we fire things like neutrons and x-rays at them and we use this to specifically see on a nano scale exactly how things are inserting in to these membranes that represent ourselves, our skin, our nerve endings, and using this knowledge in order to design new drugs or new ways of targeting particular cancer cells or various things in that way. 
>>So, being at Kent is incredibly exciting, not only from a geographical perspective  - where we're situated in the southeast of the UK gives us access to a lot of these facilities like I've mentioned before, like Isis and Diamond in Oxfordshire  - but also around us we have a lot of industry that are interested in working with what we're doing and building what we're doing. But then also within Kent itself, within the University itself, we've got an exciting cross-disciplinary team of people in biology and engineering, all the way through to the social sciences – we can all work together to work on some of these projects and ideas that we're working on to move forwards and go in
new directions that I never thought would be possible without the University of Kent. 
>>So for me it's incredibly important that we take the research that I'm doing in the
lab and bring it into the classroom environment. If we look at the path of the students as they go through their careers at the University and they go out into the world, we hope they will be the future research leaders and developing new techniques and technologies, so it's incredibly important for me that I take the techniques, the cutting-edge techniques that I'm developing in my lab, and bring that into the classroom environment to give them a context in what they're learning so that they can see where their futures
will lead in their research. 
>>To give an example, I'm currently working on new fingerprinting techniques for polymer banknotes and looking at metal surfaces, which is currently being used by police forces across the UK, and I bring that into the lab and teach that to the second and third-year students so they can really see how research impacts what they are learning right now.