Tigany Zarrouk hails from Bolton, England. He joined the group as a postdoctoral researcher in August 2022, focussing on nanopore formation in carbon materials. He graduated with an MSci from Imperial College London in 2017, where he developed cellular automata models to simulate the spontaneous emergence and risk of Atrial Fibrillation with Professor Kim Christensen. He completed his PhD at King’s College London under the supervision of Professor Tony Paxton in 2022. During his PhD, he fitted numerous tight-binding models to DFT and empirical data, allowing for the first tight-binding model able to describe water, titanium dioxide, titanium hydride, hydrogen and titanium metal, simultaneously. This model was used to investigate fundamental atomistic mechanisms behind solute hardening in titanium alloys, with his PhD sponsor Rolls-Royce. Furthermore, an iron-carbon tight-binding model was used to elucidate the origin of the softening effect of carbon in iron and the feasibility of a dislocation-assisted carbon migration in bearing steels, in partnership with SKF.