Amy Hall is from Keevil, a little village in Wiltshire, England, which is not too far from Bath, a well known Roman spa town. She got her degree in Physics in 2009 from the University of Oxford, which sounds impressive, but to be honest, Jesus College is not that good, especially given the quality across the Turl. Looking to broaden her horizons, Amy quite sensibly decided to do our Nanoscale Science and Technology MSc. Her well-deserved distinction demonstrated to me that she had the ability to do research at the highest level. Fortunately, she agreed to do a PhD in my group, provided I gave her something bio-related, largely because that would prove to be a more interesting challenge for her. She thus started in October 2010 to work on the interaction with surfaces of certain pathogens. It may surprise the reader, but I am not a world-leading authority on such things (I can do the surfaces bit), so we have two collaborators who can make this claim: Matthew Rogers, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who knows a thing or two about the protozoa, Leishmania, whilst David Dockrell, then of the Medical School and now at Edinburgh, is splendldly cogniscant with matters of macrophages and pathogenic bacteria. Amy also needed some serious chemistry, and this she learnt at Durham University in the group of Neil Cameron. Neil has also since left for the other side of the world. On Wednesday August 12, 2015 Amy successfully defended her thesis before her examiners, Professors Simon Foster (University of Sheffield) and Steve Brocchini of University College London. The picture above shows her in Gangnam (Seoul) the day before travelling to Jeju Island to present her work.
Publications
A. R. Hall, J. T. Blakeman, A. M. Eissa, P. Chapman, A. L. Morales-García, L. Stennett, O. Martin, E. Giraud, D. H. Dockrell, N. R. Cameron, M. Wiese, L. Yakob, M. E. Rogers, and M. Geoghegan "Glycan-glycan interactions determine Leishmania attachment to the midgut of permissive sand fly vectors" Chem. Sci. 11 10973-83 (2020)
A. R. Hall and M. Geoghegan "Polymers and biopolymers at interfaces" Rep. Prog. Phys. 81 036601 (2018)
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)
Oral presentations
World Congress on Biomimetics, Artificial Muscles, and Nano-bio, Jeju Island, South Korea, August 2013
Bruker AFM Users meeting, Bruxelles, November 2012