Karen Faulds

Our research focuses on using surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) to create new approaches to bioanalysis for use in the life and clinical sciences.  SERS is a spectroscopic technique that offers significant advantages over other established techniques such as fluorescence and our research has focused on highlighting the advantages, creating new examples of increased capability in life science applications and interacting with end users to shape future step changes in research.  Our research centres around using the inherent sensitivity of SERS for the detection of target DNA or proteins using signal amplification methods to enhance the signal rather than using target amplification methods such as PCR.  Our work has focussed on exploiting the sensitivity of SERS for quantitative analysis of biomolecules as well as exploiting one of the key advantages of SERS, the ability to analyse multiple analytes in one sample.  This allows more information to be gained per analysis as well as giving information about complex systems that are intrinsically difficult to measure.