Dr Peter Gierth Andrew Mason Duncan Howe
Dr Peter Gierth heads up the NMR Facility as our Senior NMR Specialist. Pete joined the team in September 2021 to bring much needed support and a wealth of experience in both solution and solid state NMR. Pete obtained his PhD in 2005 from the University of Cambridge with Professor Melinda Duer, here in the department following his MSCi, Natural Sciences (Chemistry) also here in Cambridge. His thesis, entitled Relaxation-based signal seperation in solid-state NMR Spectroscopy gave him a strong theoretical grounding along with practical experience in a research solid-state environment. From 2005 to 2021, Pete worked in the applications laboratory at Bruker UK Ltd (the UK arm of our instrument supplier), first as an Applications Scientist and then from 2010 as NMR Applications Team Leader, where he was responsible for the technical support of all the UK spectrometers supplied by Bruker. In this role he gained further practical experience with a wide variety of experiments, nuclei and pulse sequence development/troubleshooting. Working in this manufacturer role, Pete is familiar with a vast array of hardware, and experience in diagnosing and rectifying a variety of system faults. He is constantly looking to improve his knowledge and understanding of NMR, and enjoys disseminating that to the wider NMR community.
Andrew Mason and Duncan Howe are NMR specialist technical assistant-staff with 24+ years experience each on the departmental instruments. Duncan has a joint Chemistry/Computing degree from the University of St Andrew's and generally runs the 500MHz Cryoprobe instrument, Aberlour in B28. He can advise on all aspects of NMR, and specialises in computer related queries and the implementation of new techniques and experiments on our spectrometers. Particular strengths include Non Uniform Sampling, the use of the Dynamics Centre for DOSY processing and kinetics. Duncan is the NMR Facility training lead, standardising the way in which new users are taught the safe and correct way to operate a high field spectrometer. Why not have a look at Duncan's NMR Blog!
Andrew gained his Chemistry degree at the University of York and can usually be found on the 400MHz QNP Cryoprobe spectrometer, Cragganmore also in B28. He deals with the majority of the external samples that require preparation prior to analysis and is responsible for the safe disposal of these materials and other contaminated waste. He is responsible for the accounts, administration, trained user recording, consumable ordering and price negotiation and implementation of the booking system. He can help with all general NMR enquiries, is in charge of the facility website, social media, general housekeeping in the section and is the lead on the NMR training/tutorial video production. He is very interested in implementation of the LEAN process in an academic environment in order to reduce cost, improve efficiency and productivity and eliminate mistakes and failure modes.