Home › Faculty
Teaching StaffThe person marking your report watched you take the reading
Meridian has no separate cadre of researchers who never teach. Every member of academic staff runs laboratory sessions, holds tutorials, and marks the work of students they have supervised at the bench.
Department 01
Dr Ines Okafor
Twenty-one years in environmental testing before joining the Academy. Wrote the current error-budget guidance and still teaches the first-year titration block herself.
Tomas Brandt
Runs the balance room and the gravimetric sequence. Known among students for refusing to accept a mass recorded to more figures than the instrument can justify.
Dr Renu Shastri
Teaches separation science and supervises chromatography projects. Joined from a pharmaceutical quality-control laboratory and keeps close ties with several placement hosts.
Department 02
Professor Halvard Lind
Runs the thermodynamics sequence and the pre-term mathematics clinic. Has taught the same opening lecture on entropy for nineteen years and rewrites it every summer.
Dr Mei-Ling Chau
Kinetics and reaction mechanism. Insists students plot raw data before any linearisation, on the grounds that a straight line will always appear if you transform hard enough.
Aaron Delacroix
Maintains the thermal laboratory and supervises the independent calorimetric project. Responsible for the heat-loss correction protocol used across the department.
Department 03
Dr Nadia Ferreira
Established the department in 2007. Marks yield honestly rather than generously, and is the author of the departmental line that an unexplained ninety per cent is a worse answer than a documented forty.
Dr Kwame Osei
Structural analysis by infrared and NMR together. Runs the second-year spectra clinic where students bring their own unassigned traces.
Elsa Vandermeer
Responsible for fume extraction, reagent handling and every safety sign-off in the building. No student reaches a bench without her signature.
Who arranges the placements
The placement office sits outside the four departments deliberately, so that matching decisions are made on the student's interest and circumstances rather than on which department has spare capacity.
Yusuf Adeyemi has run the office since 2015 and personally visits every new partner laboratory before a student is sent there. Clara Nowak handles the matching round, travel arrangements and the hardship applications that go with them.
Tutorial availability
Every member of teaching staff holds two open tutorial hours each week, published on the department noticeboard and not requiring an appointment. Students registered with a named tutor also get a scheduled slot every fortnight.
Department heads take calls from applicants
If you want to know whether a route suits you, ask the person who runs it. The Academy office will arrange a fifteen-minute call.