Dr Susannah Bourne-Worster
Royal Society University Research Fellow and Assistant Professor in Computational Chemistry/Data Science (proleptic) at Durham University
Chemistry
Plants have been running their own renewable energy system for billions of years, using photosynthesis to turn sunlight into the energy needed to grow, survive and sustain life on Earth. Inspired by this, Susannah Bourne-Worster is interested in what we can learn from them to design our own sustainable energy technologies.
Through computer simulations, rather than lab experimentation, Susannah studies how molecules react to light and how that can be changed or controlled by the way they interact with stuff around them. Using nature as her muse, she hopes to explore whether we can design solar technologies that are not only effective, but sustainable. Keen to prioritise recyclability, availability and safety alongside performance, Susannah maintains that plants haven’t optimised at the expense of everything else, so why should we?
At heart, Susannah is driven by curiosity and a desire to understand how things work. That curiosity first drew her to chemistry, which she sees as a bridge between the fundamental principles of physics and the complexity of biology. She loves the way different disciplines come together in scientific research, believing that subjects often taught separately at school become far more interesting when combined to help us understand the world around us.
Susannah is the first to point out that her work is unlikely to transform our energy systems overnight. Instead, she focuses on the fundamental questions that underpin future innovation, building the understanding that we can use to develop the technologies of the future. For Susannah, learning from the way plants achieve remarkable things with simple, sustainable materials is part of laying the foundations for the breakthroughs of the future.
