School of Pharmacy

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Bradley Hopkins

EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow, Faculty of Science

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Biography

I received my MSci (Hons) in Chemistry from the University of Nottingham in July 2020, followed by undertaking a PhD in Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Nottingham from September 2020 to September 2024.

My current work as an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow is focused on improving the reliability and circularity of medicines manufacturing.

Expertise Summary

My research career so far has focused on utilizing alternative solvents towards solving challenges associated with plastic recycling and drug manufacturing.

During my masters research project, I explored the use of binary mixtures of ionic liquids as a medium for controlling the catalysis of electro-chemical oxidation of alcohols to aldehydes under the supervision of Professor Pete Licence.

I switched my focus from ionic liquids to supercritical carbon dioxide during my PhD, where I exploited the ability of this solvent to swell plastics, as well as the easy removal of gaseous carbon dioxide at the end of the process, to develop low-waste routes for recycling. Swelling plastics enabled the impregnation of molecules capable of absorbing microwave radiation, opening up the possibility to employ this radiation as an energy source for recycling to value-added products. Supercritical carbon dioxide was also successfully used as the medium for degrading plastics by a conventional chemical reaction, massively reducing the amount of waste organic solvent inherent to chemical recycling.

I have continued working with supercritical carbon dioxide as a postdoc, and my current work concerns using a supercritical carbon dioxide extraction system to rapidly clean resins used by the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture and purify novel drugs. The success of the cleaning is validated by a portfolio of advanced imaging techniques: time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy.

School of Pharmacy

University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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www.nottingham.ac.uk/enquiry