Associate Professor Sarah Guerin

Sarah Guerin is Associate Professor in Sustainable Energy Harvesting in the Department of Chemical Sciences in University of Limerick.

She is working on computationally-guided crystal engineering of organic crystals for pharmaceutical and energy harvesting applications.

Sarah is Principal Investigator and Head of the Actuate Lab in UL's Bernal Institute, an ERC Starting Grant Fellow and an SSPC Funded Investigator.

Sarah says the climate crisis means researchers must act now as we deal with one of the world’s grand challenges.

I think a researcher is somebody who is trying to solve problems, somebody who enjoys discovering new things. I think there’s a curiosity and a desire to learn around being a researcher and experiencing even if it’s for 30 seconds of being the first person on the planet to figure out how something works or to know what happens at the smallest scale of something is very exciting.

My research it looks at a certain type of sensing material. It’s a type of sensor called piezoelectric sensors, which essentially means you’re intercoverting a force and an electrical signal.

However, the materials that are currently used for this contain lead. It’s one of the few places on earth that we still have lead at a consumer level.

Piezoelectric materials are really unique and that they’re used for a lot of very day-to-day applications and then a lot of very advanced applications. You’ll find them in atomic force microscopes and other very precise scientific equipment. But you also find them in every barbecue lighter, but also every microphone in your phone and your laptop so because they have this very simple conversion of energy they’re actually used in thousands of applications.

Once we perfect what we’re doing you’ll find them in phones and laptops and medical devices, and they also have kind of these new applications. Because the materials we’re using our biodegradable and biocompatible you could also have this energy force conversion inside the body.

So not only can we relace all these ubiquitous kinds of barbecue lighters or scientific equipment sensing applications, we can also do things like detecting things inside the human body or pacemakers that are powered by the beating of your heart because the heart beating will generate the electrical signal that will power the pacemaker, so you won’t have to get a surgery to replace the battery in those kinds of medical devices. From the very small to the very big there’s literally thousands of applications.

I think what we do in the lab is a workflow. So there’s a couple of stages and there’s been moments where we’ve predicted something using a computer model and then I’ve gone in the lab and I’ve made the material and I’ve seen the exact number the exact property that we predicted using the computer models on a machine in the lab and that never gets old for me.

The ongoing joy

I think we’ve had maybe five or six of them now and every time it’s the same level of, “I can’t believe I get to do this, or I can’t believe that this works”. So, for me, it’s being able to control and engineer things at this really small scale and being able to see things go from something that you build sitting at a computer at your desk to making it into a functional device that can go into a medical device, or they can go into a phone or a laptop. This hasn’t stopped being meaningful for me, it hasn’t stopped being exciting.

I think I like the idea of making real change in the world. I like looking forward and seeing my device be in somebody’s electronic device or I like the idea of making kinds of medical devices that have never been done before, to open up avenues that have never been explored before. I think day to day I think I just I love the idea of running this big research group.

And on the other side something that I say a lot is the research will always get done if we have the funding and the infrastructure, but I think mentorship is about creating an environment for people want to come in and do the science everyday and people want to come in and make these discoveries.

So I think a lot of mentorship is more about creating a culture and an environment, and I think also to become a good mentor you have to have seen good mentorship in action and I think as somebody who’s been in UL for 10 years now, I can see the mentors who really shaped me and who were role models as well as mentors for me when I’m now starting my own group and my own career as a principal investigator.

Excitement as things grow

I think I’m enjoying watching my own research group grow very naturally grow similar to the direction that the university is looking to grow. I’ve done my undergraduate here [in UL] and my PhD and I’ve had a nice journey through the university, so I think I am enjoying growing as the university grows. And I think it’s been fun and exciting.

I think my being kind of a young and ambitious researcher ties in with UL being a young and ambitious university. It’s exciting to be working in a university that’s currently growing and getting bigger and that has its own sustainable vision for how it’s going to be in five to ten years.

Not seeing is as important as seeing

Having an impact in research can be in the smaller things and mightn’t be something people realise that we are doing. But the idea that we’ll be working on projects like carbon capture and sustainable materials, we’re creating these opportunities to make a better future for everybody around us and for future generations. In a nice way I think that if we do it right, nobody will know that we’ve done it.

The reason it is a grand challenge is because we don’t have a choice anymore. We have to do something, and we have to take action in the research that we’re doing.

Shift in mindset

I think hopefully people are starting to shift their mindset towards, if not wanting, then needing a sustainable society so I think the research that we do while creating more eco-friendly materials is also creating more high-performance materials so that we’re not swapping them out for inferior but environmentally friendly applications.

We’re saying, “No, this material is better, it will give you better performance and it’s better for the environment,” and that’s really what’s on us as scientists to make what we do beneficial to people outside of its environmental impact so that we’re improving people’s quality of life, be that through medical devices or just better phone performance or better signal on their Wi-Fi. It’s about making people’s lives easier while making their quality of life better.

Opportunities abound

I think Ireland’s very uniquely placed to become a world leader. I think in a number of fields, but for us the materials that we’re proposing for these application are already being made by the tonne every day in our pharmaceutical companies. So particularly for this new sensing material, I think Ireland could really become a hub for its production and its implementation.  These materials are so simple that you could make them at home and that’s something that we’re doing with this project. We’re going to be sending out kits to homes around Ireland starting in UL and Limerick so people can make these sensors at home.

I think even that kind of impact of homes and families around Ireland being able to make this themselves and also the amount of industry connections that we have in the university for the pharmaceutical industry, this is going to be an exciting time. I think there’s an avenue even in three to five years of this really taking of as an Irish-led sustainable material.

Society continues ‘as normal’

Hopefully the human impact we will be creating is a sustainable society where life can just continue and can be where we’re not living with the consequences of climate change in the future. But I’d also take that in the more specific direction for us with the medical devices, and I think of personalised medicine and of people not having to go for surgeries to replace batteries because all of our medical devices will be self-powered. I think it goes from the very grand challenge of climate change down to somebody not having to go for an extra surgery for a condition that they have.

Curious about Sarah Guerin's research