Profile

I live in Bath with my boyfriend and we both work at the university. I like living here because there are lots of lovely places to go for a walk. We have two bunnies called Flump and Rosie who love watching TV with us in the evenings.

Rosie and Flump

I’m a computer nerd and I run a maker club at the university where we build projects with Arduino and raspberry pi which is a lot of fun. So far we’ve built robots, a full chessboard, robotic hands, a nerf gun radar, a remote control aeroplane to name a few. I love it because I get to work on my own projects while I teach the students.

I’m a very creative person and have lots of craft projects at home. I do lots of painting and drawing and my boyfriend likes to put them up all over the house. I also listen to music all the time (especially in the lab, dancing helps the science work better) and play the guitar really loud in my garden. I love taking pictures of the things I get up to and have won some prizes for my science photographs.

I work in a research lab at the university that focuses on ways to change the colour of light to use in quantum computers. To do this, we use very powerful lasers to shine light down a specially designed piece of glass fibre or a special crystal and measure what comes out the other side. I often have to do my work in the dark as the lights in the room can change the results of the experiment.

Our university has a special facility that lets me make my own glass fibre so I get to design and build it myself. One piece of fibre usually takes about a week to make so I have to do some careful calculations on the computer first to make sure it will work before I build it. It’s a very long and difficult process but I enjoy the change to make something that no one has made before and test it to see some new science.

Once I’ve done my experiments I have to spend some time looking at the results which usually means creating lots of graphs and charts. I like to try and make them as interesting and clear as possible because I like sharing my work with other people.

One of the special crystals used in my lab lit up with a laser beam

One of the special fibres I make with a laser beam going through it

First thing I have to do is turn my lasers on and wait for them to warm up. I usually check my emails and get a coffee while I’m waiting. Then I set up the experiment and make sure everything is working properly. This takes about an hour. Once it’s working, I have to wait for it to stabilize, so I go and have some lunch with my colleagues (and another coffee!). Then I go back to the lab in the afternoon to take some data and test my pieces of fibre.

Sometimes I don’t need to be in the lab so I will crunch some numbers on my computer. My office has 15 people in it so I try to do this somewhere quiet and with a good supply of tea and biscuits.

On the days that I’m making the pieces of fibre I test, I spend all day in the special clean room in a silly suit building the fibre slowly at a larger scale then putting it into a big furnace (at 2000 degrees!!) and pulling it into one really long fibre. It kinda looks like pulling toffee!

Me in my big clean room suit, building some glass fibre ready to go into the furnace.