Profile

I live on a small farm near the West Coast of Wales. It is about 30 km south of Aberystwyth where I work. My parents also live on the farm, they bought the place and moved here about 25 years ago. I moved here about 11 years ago – it is difficult to be precise because I moved in stages. When I first moved here we kept cows, pigs, sheep and chickens, but when my father got older, and I became busier, this became difficult, and so we gave them up in the same order, except the chickens, which we still have. The farm is approximately 11 hectares, 4 are woodland, mostly the rest is grassland, which is now munched by the neighbour farmer’s sheep. The farm still keeps me pretty busy – everything needs to be maintained, especially the fences.

I grew up in Telford, which is the where my father’s family are from for generations unknown. Telford was created in the 1960s and 70s as a new town joining together some smaller towns. My family had always kept animals – dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, gerbils, fish, horses, chickens, goats, a jackdaw and probably more – and my parents had always dreamed to be farmers. It was not possible to buy a far in Shropshire on my parent’s budget, but they managed to find this place in Wales and moved here when I was 20 years old.

I moved to Oxford when I was 18 to read Physics at Jesus College. I had a really great time and made some amazing friends, but I did not study hard and the college suggested I take a year break in industry, which I did. For many reasons I failed to gain re-entry into Jesus College the next year, so I continued with my career. The missed opportunity at Oxford and lack of degree always haunted me, and I was envious of my frolleague (friend and colleague) who was immediately respected as his title is Dr. I had accidentally ended up working in the finance industry, and after some time finally realised that I was not at all motivated by money, and although my work was very interesting technically, I found the objectives of my labours soul destroying. And so, when I moved to Wales for other reasons, I noted that Aberystwyth had a pretty good Physics Dept and enrolled on the Master of Physics course. I have never once looked back at my career before with any longing, although I am happy with all that I achieved in my jobs before academia, and the skills I learned in the IT industry have proved very valuable in my science studies and job.

I am a habitual volunteer. I have coached cricket for over ten years and I sit on many cricket administration committees. I was a scout leader for about ten years, but I had to pack this in towards the end of my PhD, as I could not fit everything in. I had lots of volunteer roles during my time studying in Aberystwyth. I have always thrown myself into my volunteer roles. That is, as fully committed as time allows, and I am equally proud of the things I have achieved through them as in my studies and paid work.

I learned to code on my first computer when I was about 10. It was an Acorn Electron and it had 32kB of random access memory – that is in total, for storing data and running programs and everything. My current computer has 16GB RAM, which is about half a million times as much as my first computer, and that is just for running programs. It has 1.12TB of disk for storing data, which is about 35 million times more than the Electron. I learned to code because I could not afford to buy all the games I wanted, and so I thought I would try writing them. I never really managed to write anything that compared with the commercial games, because to be fast they needed to be written in machine code (unintelligible streams of numbers) or assembly language (three letter abbreviated commands and heximal numbers), but I did spend hours and hours until late in the night sat at my computer and learned a lot about how they work and how to get them to work for you.

My first proper job was as a design engineer working on public telephone housings – like telephone boxes, but not all public telephones are in a box! It is probably difficult for the mobile phone generation to understand how important public phones were before we all had mobiles. People used to ask me “Why do you need to design telephone boxes, surely they have been designed already”. It was not quite true, people were always coming up with new designs, but anyway, I worked for company that made telephone housing, so my job was not to come up with what the things looked like, but how they were to be made. You might be thinking “Hang on, this guy got kicked out of university and went straight into a technical job with no appropriate qualification.”, and you would be right to ponder. Basically, a friend of the family believed in me a gave me a chance. I did a work experience placement for two weeks there when I was in secondary school and they remembered that I did a good job back then. I spent 9 months in the job and made designs for housings that are still in place in railway stations and outside the Channel Tunnel terminal. Probably the most life changing part of this job was the opportunity that arose when we were buying a new 3D computer aided design system. My ability to quickly learn the new software and my cheeky negotiating questions impressed the bosses of the company selling the software and they did not forget me.

I moved to Derby to be with my girlfriend of the time when I was 20. I could not find a satisfactory job following on from the design engineer role, and I spent some time unemployed. Eventually I took a job as a commission only (no wages unless you sell something) computer sales person. The company was a bit of a sham, and although I did manage to get promoted to an actual salaried position and worked hard trying to sell PCs, the company folded. I looked in the local paper and saw an advert for another computer sales job, but this one had a big fat salary. I applied thinking that I had virtually zero chance to get the job, but I got an interview, and after long questioning they offered me a position (not quite the salary in the advert, but double anything I had earned before). I did pretty well at that job and lived a dandy life for 18 months, and then I met some people at a trade show that I knew from before – the CAD company bosses. Well, they enticed me with a very exciting sounding job. So I moved to Northwich, Cheshire to join them.

And so I worked with these people in Cheshire for about 10 years in different roles and in companies with different structures and names, sometimes as a director and others as a shareholder. I would have got rich if I had held my nerve, but I quit a few years before they were bought out. I started in marketing, promoting Virtual Jack – the most realistic virtual human software around at the time. He would look pretty shabby alongside modern computer game characters though. The list of companies that used it includes almost every big high end engineering company you can think of, and they used it to help design car and fighter jet cockpits and the like. Then, new software meant a new role, and so when we started to sell Deneb software I became the lead consultant / developer for QUEST, which was a factory process simulation package. I made a good career out of this for about 5 years, and worked on many amazing projects. When the company decided to stop selling design and manufacturing software I was asked if I wanted a new role working on finance system automation. I became a bit of a guru on automated data extraction from semi-structured documents, which means getting a computer to automatically read useful bits of information off documents like invoices. I did this for about 3 years, then I had a melt down.

Some time later, out of financial necessity I searched out a new job. I found one similar to the previous one, but it was in Shrewsbury and I lived in Chester, which is about a 1 hour commute. So I found some digs with a family friend in Telford, which was a 12 minute commute. I flitted back and forth between Chester, Telford and customer sites, but found myself spending more and more weekends at my parents farm, then I negotiated 3 days per week working from home in Wales, then I went down to just working 2 days for week, then they made me redundant. I tried working as an independent software developer for a bit, but it meant having to go to England quite frequently and I was much happier at the farm. Someone I met mentioned that there were good maintenance grants for mature students at the time. I checked out Aberystwyth University at an open day. First the Agriculture Dept, then Physics. The Physics Dept had lots of cool stuff.

It was pretty strange going back to university at 34 years old, I don’t think the other students knew what to think about the old guys who always sat at the front and asked lots of questions. I didn’t really make any friends on my course until the later years when we started working closely together on projects. I lived at home with my parents, so I did not socialise that much (learning from past mistakes!), but I did make a few friends through the Tennis Club. Then I found the Table Tennis Club in year two and made some truly great friends. Together we transformed the Table Tennis Club from a few people to well over 50 players at times.

I did not get involved with student representation as an undergraduate, as it did not seem my place, not being a typical student. However, as a postgraduate I was not so untypical and anyway no-one else wanted to do it. I felt like I was in an ideal place to try and implement the many ideas I had during my undergraduate studies, and working through the Physics Dept Staff and Student Consultative Committee, we achieved a great many things to the betterment of all the students. I went on to become Institute Representative, which meant I was active university wide and got to know a lot of people, including the Vice-Chancellor. I was Postgraduate Officer to the Student Union for a while until they decided I was ineligible. This was pretty lucky as I don’t think I would have have finished my PhD in time – Dept Rep., Institute Rep. and Postgraduate Officer meant many, many meetings.

I was a bit concerned when I started my undergraduate course in Aberystwyth – would I be able to remember the things that I had learned 16 years ago? Well, it turned out that I could remember well enough, and the first year modules did not assume much in depth prior knowledge, just the ability to learn quickly. I was very committed and did very well. I won quite a few academic prizes. The best prize of all was the award of my PhD funding, which came from Aberystwyth University – the fiercely fought over Doctoral Career Development Scheme.

The change from undergraduate to postgraduate was quite dramatic. No real structure, no lessons, no exams, just self-motivated research and all day every day. And no four month holiday in the summer! Ask any PhD student, it can be very demoralising because often nothing comes from a lot of hard work – sometimes things just don’t work out. I had to make a lot of life changes – reducing the amount of work on the farm, dropping some volunteer roles. However, I got there in the end, and now I am Dr. Pitchford. I also met many people during my PhD time. Some great friends in Aberystwyth and collaborators all round the world. I managed to contribute to three published papers along the way as well, which is essential for future job prospects. My supervisor and some of his counterparts in other universities put together a grant proposal for a pan-European project called “Theory-blind Quantum Control”. It was successful, and I was offered a job on the project as Post-Doctoral Research Assistant, and this is my role now. I have done a lot of travelling around Europe with this job, working especially closely with people in Vienna, Austria and Olomouc, Czech Republic.

As part of my PhD I contributed to an open source software (OSS) project called QuTiP. Basically I wrote some code that was useful for myself and colleagues working in the same field and we decided to share it with others working on quantum control research. One thing lead to another and I ended up managing the whole library, which was a lot of work. We have managed to get quite a good sized team now, and it is one of my joys to work with these great people who volunteer their time to develop and support these software tools that are used by researchers all over the world. And because we do this, all those people get to use this very smart software absolutely for free. And if it does not do quite what they want, then they can add to it a bit and share that with everyone else. In case you can tell already, OSS is the closest thing I have to religion in my life. I should perhaps add that I have made three expenses paid trips to Japan thanks to QuTiP, so it’s not all charity!