Margaret Clapham

Margaret Clapham, Ph.D., is a trained chemist and analytical scientist with strong expertise in analysis of polymeric and organic materials. She assists clients in understanding complex materials performance issues by applying a range of both established and novel analytical techniques to material systems. She has experience with materials used in a variety of industries including semiconductor manufacturing, organic electronics, water purification, building materials, and medical devices.

Dr. Clapham has extensive experience investigating structure-property relationships of materials through analysis with Raman spectroscopy and microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), powder and single crystal x-ray diffraction (PXRD/SCXRD). Her toolkit also includes nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS), computed tomography (CT) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). She has additional expertise consulting in the area of volatiles analysis, particularly in coupled thermal & spectroscopic techniques, such as TGA-FTIR, TGA-GCMS, and pyrolysis-GCMS.

During her time at DuPont, Dr. Clapham developed and executed analytical methodologies related to failure analysis, root-cause investigations, raw material analysis, as well as safety and hazard analysis. Her analytical insights have supported all stages of product life cycle from R&D to scale-up and applications development.

Dr. Clapham earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Minnesota where she investigated molecular and solid-state structure effects on energetic properties of optoelectronic materials. Her research was highly cross-discipline, involving organic synthesis, crystallography, Raman spectroscopy development and computational chemistry.