Thin films surfaces and interfaces

Dr Iain Dunlop's uses methods from nanotechnology and surface chemistry to address questions in cell biology. In vivo, cells determine their behaviour largely by reacting to their environments; in particular, they respond to specific signals that are located on surfaces that they come into contact with. Such signals are hugely important in ensuring each cell plays its role within multicellular organisms. However, because biological surfaces are complex, it can be difficult to know exactly which features are significant.

Materials lie at the heart of almost every modern technology and our research is dedicated to the application and development of theory and computational simulation tools for solving problems in materials. We develop and use methods at a wide range of length and time-scales, combining analytical theory, quantum mechanical first-principles simulations of interacting electrons and nuclei, atomistic simulations that use simpler models of interatomic bonding, coarse-grained molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo techniques.