Dr Dean Sheppard

I am the Departmental Lecturer in Physical & Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and I am the tutor in Physical Chemistry at LMH and Somerville College. I also teach students at Trinity College and St Peter's College. I studied for my MChem degree at Magdalen College (2008-2012) before moving to New College for a DPhil in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Stuart Mackenzie, which I completed in 2016. I received a Mathematical, Physical & Life Science (MPLS) Division Teaching Award in 2022 and completed a PGCert in Teaching & Learning in Higher Education in 2023, becoming a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

My DPhil research was concerned with the photochemical spin dynamics of proteins, suggested to be the basis of the magnetic sense in some animals. It involved the development of a range of highly sensitive optical cavity-enhanced techniques to detect very small changes in reactivity caused by an external magnetic field.

My position at LMH involves teaching the whole undergraduate Physical Chemistry course, from Prelims (1st Year) to Final Honours School (3rd Year). I hold tutorials for small groups of students where we discuss the lecture course material in detail and expand on their understanding. We also meet in larger groups for problems classes to cover the more numerical aspects of each topic, and I offer thematic revision classes to prepare each group of students for their respective exams.

In the Chemistry department I lecture the first-year course on Electrostatics, provide synoptic revision lectures to all years, and examine the first-year Physical Chemistry Prelim paper.

Broadband Cavity-Enhanced Detection of Magnetic Field Effects in Chemical Models of a Cryptochrome Magnetoreceptor, J. Phys. Chem. B., 118, 4177, (2014)

Millitesla Magnetic Field Effects on the Photocycle of an Animal Cryptochrome, Sci. Rep., 7, (2017).