Dr. Chris Silwood

• The employment of multivariate chemometric techniques for viral-induced salivary biomarker detection in a series of patients, including comparisons of the salivary profiles with those of non-medically-compromised, healthy human volunteers. Both supervised pattern recognition and non-supervised exploratory data analyses have been utilised, an emphasis being placed on the use of novel in-house variable selection methods for analysis optimisation and examination of the sources of variation

• Characterised a range of essential oils extracted from fruit and vegetable seeds, identifying a variety of phytochemical components

• Advised on restaurant trials concerned with the on-site testing of a novel filtration device for maintaining the shelf life of culinary oils and reducing the development of toxic oxidation products and trans fats • Career note: a family-related sabbatical was then taken from May 2009 - January 2010

• Identified the precise chemical forms of potentially toxic metals released from hip- and knee-joint prosthetic replacements in biological media, focussing on cobalt(II), chromium(III), titanium(IV), aluminium(III) and vanadium(III), (IV) and (V) • Characterised a range of lipid oxidation products (LOPs, present at the millimolar level) and released free fatty acids (both cis and trans) present in samples generated during the thermal stressing of a range of animal fats, vegetable and fish oils

• Coordinated clinical trials for associated dental research projects • Multinuclear NMR spectroscopy was employed for the exhaustive indexing of small molecule components in saliva (>60) and carious lesions (>15) • Studied the pathogenesis of disease processes in vivo (such as atherosclerosis) initiated by the presence of lipid oxidation products (LOPs) generated within culinary oils • Identified NMR- and GC-detectable LOPs generated through the sterilising irradiation of soybean oil-filled breast implants

Title of PhD thesis: "NMR spectroscopic studies of intramolecular hydrogen bonding in 1,2 and 1,3 -diols". The studies also involved conformational and solvation mode analyses of steroids, carbohydrates and nucleosides. Appropriate hydrogen bonding isotope shift theory was also developed.

Subsidiary subject: History and Philosophy of Science.