Dipak Sarker – A Materials Scientist and New Member of the Centre for Aquatic Environments

We would like to welcome a new member of the Centre for Aquatic Environments.

Dipak Sarker has been a Principal Lecturer based in The School of Applied Sciences (PABS) teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate pharmacy, chemistry, biomedical sciences and to a lesser extent engineering courses, since he entered the University in 2001. His background in materials science (the amalgamation of chemistry, engineering and physics) and much of his work involves colloidal and surface science along with nanotechnology. He serves as an external examiner for chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences at Kingston University in London. Over his career Dipak has moved between working in industry R&D (Unilever, Hoffmann-La Roche, GSK) and in academia in the UK, France and Germany. In fact he came from the physics department at the ÉNS (a University of Paris graduate school) prior to joining full-time as a lecturer at the University of Brighton.

Dipak has been interested in materials since graduating in Chemistry in 1988, going on to undertake an MSc in Engineering before completing a PhD in Physics. He has a history of working with research groups overseas, was a Post-Doc in Brittany, Paris and Berlin and has a profile of long-standing collaboration with physics and materials groups in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, China and Turkey. He met his molecular biology researcher wife though work with a professor in the Biophysics group at the University of Sofia. He has also supervised PhD students and post-docs from most of these countries as well as the UK and continues to work with most of these collaborators.

He has always loved research that takes fundamental and theoretically-based understanding and takes this to either improve understanding (cf. French and German publications, Pure profile) in a new field or uses this know-how to improve the world outside of academia. As a current enterprise rep in PABS he has a passion for working between academic and business. For this reason he has undertaken consultancy in the engineering of a drug delivery device and his success in securing 3 KTP projects (industry-academia collaborations) in the last 4 years. He says, “The KTP system has provided avenues to deploy science to help industry and society with its problems through innovation and I can’t get enough of it!”

As a chemical safety officer in the pharmacy and chemistry areas he has duties in over-seeing lab and instrument working in the Huxley building. Dipak has authored about 60 papers and 3 full books covering industrial manufacture, nanotechnology and packaging materials, with the last one being completed in summer 2020. Recent college and undergraduate/MSc projects have featured aspects of the accelerated testing of plastic materials, the formation of micro-plastics by physical, mechanical and chemical means, the fabrication of bioplastics that degrade in a matter of months rather than centuries, and the uptake of microplastics in to invertebrates from the marine environment.

He has said, “I’m really enthusiastic about developing research with CAE colleagues on particulate and toxic contaminant in the freshwater and marine environments and potentially even method for clean-up and extraction leading to sustainable coastal environments.”