Profile

When not doing physics at work I enjoy cycling, running, and sailing – anything that lets me be outdoors. I like living in the countryside, and being able to cycle to work, even when it’s raining! I definitely like trying adventurous new things. I have sailed all the way to Ireland and back!

Me and my partner like travelling around the world and seeing new places. We are both scientists and live in a village in Oxfordshire together, where I research X-ray physics, and she does molecular biology. We met while on a kayaking holiday, and both like being outdoors, cycling, and playing Pokemon.

Both of my parents were teachers, and I also really enjoy teaching science to people. I am very lucky that my job lets me talk to people about the research I do, and it’s great fun to be able to go all over the UK and show people all the things I’m researching.

I work at a big X-ray machine in Oxfordshire called a “synchrotron”. It is a special sort of particle accelerator that makes very intense X-ray beams! It helps us measure very small things like germs and even your DNA. We have used our X-rays to look at all sorts of things, from airplane engines to dinosaur eggs.

My work is to research new ways of measuring these X-ray beams. As you might know, X-rays can travel through other things, so they can be very difficult to measure.

To measure the X-ray beams I use man-made diamonds. Diamonds are the hardest material in the world, but the X-rays are so intense that when they travel through the diamonds they knock little bits off the diamond atoms. These little bits are called “electrons”. I carefully measure how many electrons are made, which tells me how many X-rays there must have been.

My job is to measure the X-ray beams, and make sure that they don’t wobble around too much. They need to be very stable for the experiments here to work properly. I use lots of equipment to measure the X-ray beam 10 thousand times a second! I want to make sure that it is always still and doesn’t move!

Where I work is very big, there are about 500 other people working there too, just to make the X-ray beams! Lots of people come to visit us from all over the world to measure stuff with our X-rays. It is always really fun to meet all these different people from all over the world. I like seeing what sorts of experiments they do.

The building where I work:

Me, inside the particle accelerator tunnel where the X-rays are made:

One of the experimental rooms:

Every day has different things going on, which is one of the reasons that I love working in a science lab. Sometimes things break, but this is really fun because I like fixing things if they break, and then I like making sure everything is right again!

The first thing to do is to check the experiments that were running over night, and make sure that everything is okay. We have amazing computers and robots that can run experiments over night for us and automatically make measurements. A big part of my job is writing code to tell the computers what to do. Sometimes they go wrong though, so learning how to fix them is very important!

When I have made some measurements, I write down what I have found. I share my work with other scientists all around the world, so it’s very important that I’ve written everything down carefully! We work together, and teach each other what we’ve learned.

When I have carried out one experiment, I think about what I would like to measure next. I have to carefully design a new experiment so that I can make new measurements!