Profile

I’m an experimental physicist and optical engineer, meaning I work with lasers, lenses, fibre optics, sensors and thermal imaging. I did a PhD in Swansea on using optical tweezers to trap glass nanoparticles with laser light and cooling them down close to absolute zero.  Now I work on work on developing new laser guidance systems in aerospace and defence.

Before my current job I built a system to capture and hold tiny glass nanoparticles using light. This lets us study how they move and try to cool them down. We can use lasers to cool these particles down very cold so that they almost stop moving, then we hope to be able to see weird and wonderful quantum physics at work, meaning the particle could be in two places at once!

My work now is mainly on LiDAR, using a laser to see in 3D, even in complete darkness. Robots, planes and cars can use this information to navigate and learn about the world around them. We can fire pulses of laser light out towards an object and measure how long it takes for the light to bounce and come back. By doing this lots of times we can build a picture of what’s in front of us, and how far away it is. We can even use this to measure how far away the moon is!

In the lab I build lots of different research systems, trying to make better sensors. I have to arrange mirrors and lenses to bounce laser beams around a table in exactly the right way. I mostly do this by trying out lots of different ways of doing things and see which works best. Sometimes I have to write computer code to work out what will happen if I try using a piece of equipment in the lab, I want to make sure it won’t break first!

Often I also have to tell other people in the company about what I’ve been doing and show them how it can help them. The always want to be able to use my experiments to see further or see in the dark. I also like learning about new technologies that have been invented, to see if we can use them to make our LiDAR sensors faster or smarter.