Question: what instruments have you made so far?

Charlotte Slade answered on 2 Jul 2025:

I love this question, because it gets to the heart of what I do every day. The simple answer is: I build the gadgets that scientists use to make discoveries. I get to design and build some incredibly cool (and very big, very expensive) instruments. It’s one of the best parts of my job.

My main area is building and improving two types of scientific ‘super-cameras’:

Electron Microscopes: These are the ultimate magnifying glasses. They’re so powerful they can let scientists see things as small as a single atom.
XPS Instruments: These are a bit like a ‘Chemical Detective Camera’. You can point it at the surface of something, and it tells you exactly what chemicals it’s made of. It’s how we can check if a new medical implant is perfectly clean, or what the super-thin coating on a new computer chip is made of.
But here’s the really fun part. I don’t always build a whole new instrument from scratch. A lot of my work is like being a Master Builder for scientific LEGOs.

A scientist might have a huge, amazing microscope, but they’ll come to me and say, “I wish I could heat my sample up to the temperature of pizza oven while I’m looking at it with the microscope.”

My job is to then design and build a brand new ‘LEGO brick’ – a tiny, high-tech oven module – that clicks perfectly onto the side of their multi-million-pound instrument. We have to figure out how to make it work without breaking anything, how to get the power in, and how to control it with a computer.

So I get to build the core instruments, and I also get to invent all the cool, new add-on modules that give scientists new superpowers for their research. It’s the best kind of puzzle.