Hello, my name is James Barker
and I am a reader in Analytical Science at the School of Pharmacy and Chemistry.
I am course director for a number of postgraduate masters programmes
in analytical chemistry and pharmaceutical science with management studies and in forensic analysis.
Students who complete these programmes may go on to work in the pharmaceutical and allied
chemical industries as research scientists, team leaders or as forensic scientists.
All students get to use our extensive analytical equipment and some students may be able to go
into industry for their masters research projects, depending of course upon their grades
and upon availability. Other current research topics include traditional Chinese herbal remedies
and the analysis of their bio-active ingredients in the study of anti-cancer compounds, and food
safety is also of interest to our research group and we have recently been looking at how organic
is the organic meat for sale in local supermarkets. Recent work has been with performance
enhancing and recreational drugs in athletes and how this is related to what they actually admit to taking.
It's a combination of analytical and social sciences really. We propose to use hair as a medium for this analysis.
Hair is really useful because it is relatively tamper resistant in comparison to urine analysis or blood
analysis, and you can have some idea of the chronology of the prolonged drug use.
This work is a good example of collaboration between the School of Pharmacy & Chemistry
and the School of Life Sciences, and the world anti-doping agency is very interested in the work that we are doing.
My other current research topics include traditional Chinese medicines and the analysis of their bio-active
ingredients in the study of anti cancer compounds. And food safety is also of interest to our research group
and we have recently been looking at how organic is the organic meat for sale in supermarkets.
All our doctoral students get the chance to present their work at national and international conferences
and hopefully publish in high impact factor journals.
If you are interested in any of our postgraduate courses, or in the research that any of the academics
undertake, why don't you go to our web pages, where there is a whole host of information available.
