Biography
Jennifer completed her PhD in 2017 in University College Dublin. Her thesis was entitled 'Characterisation and categorisation strategies for anisotropic gold nanoparticle for applications in biology' and focused on utilising electron tomography followed by post processing to extract biologically influential parameters (e.g. surface area, volume) of nanoparticle morphologies from their single particle 3D models.Dr Cookman joined University of Limerick as a postdoctoral researcher in electron microscopy to work with Prof Ursel Bangert on a Horizon 2020 FET-Open project called MagnaPharm. The project
focused on applied magnetic field manipulaiton of nanoscale API crystal growth using Liquid Phase Electron Microscopy (LPEM). During this project, Jennifer pioneered the LPEM investigation of API crystallisation to reveal initial inception of crystal nucleation and subsequent growth to realise polymorph selectivity and radiolysis influences.
Following the conclusion of this project, Jennifer was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Irish Research Council in 2021 to investigate pre-nucleation entities leading to crystallisation with a synergistic view from CryoTEM and LPEM.
More recently, in 2022, Dr Cookman was awarded the prestigious SFI Pathways Fellowship in collaboration with NanoMEGAS to conduct electron crystallography in situ upon single crystal inception using LPEM.
As Jennifer begins to establish her expert research group, she aspires to become an encouraging and nurturing group leader, while driving in situ electron microscopy techniques in pharmaceuticals and nano chemistry