Susan Caroline Bayliss

Susan Caroline Bayliss was due to join Queen Mary College, University of London, as a professor of nanotechnology. Sadly, she was involved in a fatal car accident near Manchester, UK, on 16 October 2004, just two weeks before she would have taken that position.

Born in Ludlow, England, on 2 December 1954, Sue studied physics at King’s College London and graduated, with honors, in 1976 with a BSc. She worked for her PhD under Yao Liang at the University of Cambridge and submitted her thesis on symmetry dependence of optical transitions in layered materials. She obtained her doctorate in 1980 and remained in Cambridge as a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College until 1985.

For the next five years Sue was a postdoc at Leicester University, where among other things she used her expertise in optical spectroscopy to study light transmission through adult and neonatal eyelids in vivo for a local hospital. That ability to cross boundaries between disciplines had become the trademark of her research ever since. Sue then accepted a lectureship at Loughborough University; she remained there until 1994. During her tenure at Loughborough, she developed her close association with the Daresbury Laboratory synchrotron radiation source and applied a range of structural methods for materials research.

Her research matured and she established her reputation as a capable scientist and original thinker at De Montfort University, where she accepted a job in 1994 as a senior lecturer. She worked in areas at the forefront of modern science: on combined structural and optical methods using synchrotron radiation under high pressure and on porous light-emitting silicon and bioelectronic systems. Her collaboration with biologists resulted in a series of pioneering publications on the interaction of nanostructured silicon with living neurons.

In 1997 Sue was appointed a professor at De Montfort—and was one of the few female professors in physics in the UK at the time. She developed numerous links with researchers from Canada, France, Russia, Sweden, and the UK, which led to friendships and exchange trips. Her contributions to many areas of science were recognized: She was a member of several bodies that define the strategy of UK and European science and was an elected member of the European High Pressure Research Group Committee, an organization that promotes high-pressure research in Europe through annual meetings and awards.

Sue shared her fascination with the properties of light through a series of lectures she delivered to local schools. Topics ranged from glowworms to luminescent nanostructures, and the series proved to be quite a success.

An open-minded person who inspired her colleagues and students, Sue opposed fitting people into categories. Beyond science, she had a passion for sport and an ear for music. She played piano and flute, and sang in a rock band. An accomplished rower since her Cambridge years, she had fun racing rowing machines against men in a local gym, finishing first most of the time.

Sue never stopped exploring. She was young in spirit and grasped life with all her heart. Her inner energy and unorthodox approach to life and science, best reflected in the following poem she wrote, provided an enviable example for those who came into contact with her: