Biography

Sharon was born in 1975 and completed her early education in Cheshire and on Merseyside. She attended Hertford College, Oxford where she studied Chemistry from 1993-1997. After completing a Royal Society summer studentship, she remained in the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, Oxford, in the group of Dr Stephen Wimperis, studying for her DPhil, (“New NMR Techniques for the Study of Quadrupolar Nuclei”). During this time she held the Carreras Senior Scholarship at Hertford College. Sharon then moved with the Wimperis group to Exeter for a two year postdoctoral research fellowship.

In 2002, Sharon moved to the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge as a Teaching Fellow in Mineral Physics. She was then awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in 2003, which she held in Cambridge alongside the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellowship at Darwin College.

In October 2005, she moved to her current position in the School of Chemistry, at the University of St Andrews, where she held (until Oct 2007) a Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship and an RCUK Academic Fellowship (05-10). Sharon was awarded the RSC Harrison Prize in 2004 for contributions to solid-state NMR and the 2009 BRSG-NMRDG Prize for Excellent Contribution to Magnetic Resonance by an Early Career Researcher. Sharon was promoted to Reader in 2009 and Professor in 2013. In 2011, Sharon was awarded the RSC Marlow Award for Physical Chemistry, and was also admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She was also named as one of the first members of the RSE Young Academy. In 2014, Sharon was a member of the Physical Sciences RAE panel for Hong Kong. In 2015, she was awarded the RSC Corday-Morgan Prize. She was awarded a Wolfson Merit Award in 2015, and in 2016 was elected FRSE. In 2017, she was the recipient of a Suffrage Science Award, celebrating the achievements of women in science. This followed from her work on the “Academic Women Now” booklet, describing the experiences of mid-career academic women in Scotland and the “Academic Women Here” booklet, highlighting mid career female academics in St Andrews.

Her current research interests focus on the development of new methods in solid-state NMR, particularly for quadrupolar nuclei, such as 17O, 23Na and 27Al. She is also interested in the application of these methods to a wide range of systems including minerals, zeolites and ceramics. More recently, Sharon has developed an interest in the application of first-principles calculations of NMR parameters in the solid state.

Outside NMR, Sharon is a big fan of football and in particular, of Liverpool FC. She was a keen gymnast when younger and is also a qualified coach and judge.