Our staff
The National EPR Facility and Service is staffed by the following people from the Department of Chemistry and the Photon Science Institute.
You can contact any of these members of staff using the details provided below, or by emailing our team mailbox: epr@manchester.ac.uk.
Professor David Collison (co-Director)
Professor David Collison has been the co-Director of the EPSRC Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectroscopy National Research Facility (NRF) since its inception in 1995. He is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at The University of Manchester, and is expert in EPR spectroscopies and their applications into the molecular and electronic structure of d- and f-block metal ions in and their influence on the reactivity and microscopic properties of metals in problems ranging from metalloenzymes to corrosion inhibition. He is co-author of the authoritative textbook EPR of d-transition Metal Compounds, and in 2020 was the recipient of the highly prestigious Bruker Prize for EPR Spectroscopy, for “experimental and theoretical fundamentals of transition metal EPR, from bioinorganic chemistry to molecular materials”. He has previously Chaired the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) EPR Group.
Professor Eric McInnes (co-Director)
Eric McInnes is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at The University of Manchester, and co-Director of the EPSRC EPR National Facility in the Photon Science Institute (PSI). He is expert in the electronic structure of paramagnetic materials, by electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy, magnetometry and related methods. In 2015 he was awarded the International EPR Society Medal for Chemistry, and in 2005 their Young Investigator Award (only the second time either has been awarded to a British scientist). In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and also awarded the RSC Tilden Prize. He was Chair of the RSC EPR Group from 2016-19, has served on the RSC Faraday Council, is Advisor on Inorganic Chemistry to the Carnegie Trust (Scotland), and is on advisory committees to the Centre for Advanced ESR (Oxford), the HiPER2 project (St Andrews), and the new EPR Facility at Imperial College London.
Dr Floriana Tuna (Facility Manager)
Floriana Tuna is a Senior Research Fellow at Manchester, and Manager of the EPSRC National EPR Facility. She is expert in applications of cw and pulsed EPR, and her expertise is sought widely by international collaborators, e.g. with active funded collaborations with colleagues in Russia (Moscow, Novosibirsk) and Brazil (São Paulo). She has made major contributions in applications of pulsed EPR in, e.g., porous materials, supramolecular chemistry and f-elements. She was awarded the Romanian Academy ‘Ilie Murgulescu’ Prize in 2005, a Marie Curie Fellowship in 2001, and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2018.
Dr Alice Bowen (Fellow)
Alice Bowen holds a Royal Society and EPSRC funded Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and was recently awarded a CAMS Analytical Trust Fund fellowship from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Alice joined The University of Manchester in 2019 through the award of a Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Fellowship. Alice’s research interests lie in the field of pulsed, dipolar and optical pump-probe EPR methods and method development for applications to chemical and biochemical systems. Prior to joining the NRF team in Manchester, she was awarded the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at Oxford University, where she also completed her DPhil, and she undertook a post-doctoral spell, supported by a Marie Curie GO-IN fellowship, with Prof Prisner at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Dr Muralidharan Shanmugam (Senior Experimental Officer)
Muralidharan Shanmugam is a Senior Experimental Officer at The University of Manchester. He has extensive expertise in EPR spectroscopy of biological and biochemical systems and until 2020 was based in the Manchester Institute for Biotechnology (MIB), being appointed to support the research activities (e.g. MAGnetic Innovation in Catalysis - MAGIC) associated with molecules with unpaired electrons (i.e. radicals and open-shell metal ions). He is also an expert in advanced pulsed, dipolar (PELDOR/RIDME), and hyperfine (HYSCORE, Electron-Nuclear Double Resonance) methods as applied to the metalloproteins and biomimetic models. Prior to this, he worked at Northwestern University (USA) with Professor Hoffman and Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (Germany) with Professor Wolfgang Lubitz using advanced pulsed EPR techniques for structural determination of Fe, Mn, Mo and Cu containing metalloproteins. From 2020, he is based in the EPR NRF in the PSI, as part of the consolidation of the EPR activities in Manchester.
Mr Adam Brookfield (EPR Technician)
Adam Brookfield is a Research Technician associated full-time with the EPR NRF in the Photon Science Institute at Manchester, being appointed there in 2015 after graduating with a degree in Physics. He oversees all technical aspects of the Facility, is expert in the operation of all the equipment, and is also instrumental in the development of new techniques. He also takes a key role in the training and wider outreach of the technique such as producing documentation and supervising summer research placements.