Katrina Cranfield

Pronouns: She/her
  • PhD research student
Date of start of studies: 1 October 2023
Supervisors: Professor Paul Kelly and Dr Jim Reynolds
Research areas: Mass spectrometry, forensic science, synthetic opioids

Biography

Katrina attained her BSc in Chemistry and MSc in Analytical Chemistry at Loughborough University. As part of her undergraduate studies, Katrina did a placement year at Bristol Myers Squibb developing analytical methods for pharmaceutical drug development. Her masters project researched the development of a LC-MS method for identifying human serum proteins for purpose of nanoparticle protein corona study.

Katrina is currently undertaking a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Paul Kelly and Dr Jim Reynolds developing mass spectrometric methods for analysing forensic evidence. Alongside her PhD, she is also a subwarden in Telford hall, a laboratory demonstrator in STEMLab, and a student ambassador for both the School of Science and for the university.

Research

Katrina is developing ambient ionisation mass spectrometry methods for detecting trace levels of illicit compounds in latent fingerprints. In particular, her work has focused on analysis of synthetic opioids and is investigating fingerprints that have also been developed.