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Sarah Appleby

My CV

  • Education:

    Millburn Academy, Inverness (2006-2012);
    University of Edinburgh (2012-2018 for my masters, 2018-2022 for my PhD)

  • Qualifications:

    Standard grades – English, Gaelic, French, Maths, Physics, Biology,
    Chemistry, Geography, Graphic Communication;
    Highers – English, French, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology;
    Advanced Highers – Physics, Maths;
    Undergraduate Masters degree – Astrophysics

  • Work History:

    2011 – 2017 : Lots of waitressing jobs at high school and university.

  • Current Job:

    2018 – present : Teaching Assistant for undergraduate physics courses

  • About Me:

    I am doing a PhD in Astronomy at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. I love learning more about astronomy and at the moment I’m studying how gas behaves in galaxies.

  • Read more

    Galaxies are very exciting and interesting to study, but unfortunately most galaxies take so long to evolve that humans can’t watch it happening. For example the Milky Way galaxy is around 13.5 billion years old, almost as old as the universe! It helps that as we look deeper into the universe, we are looking further back in time. That’s why astronomers use computer models of galaxies to try to join the dots between galaxies that are observed at different times in the universe’s history.

    What I like about galaxies is that they are affected by physics over lots of different size scales – from gravity pulling lots of galaxies together over a huge scale, to individual stars going supernova and releasing their energy into space. When we run computer models, we have to try to balance all these effects to figure out what will affect galaxies the most and how they would evolve in real life.

    We test our models by closely comparing the galaxies in our simulations to the galaxies in the real universe. If the galaxies look alike, great, we got something right in our model! If not, that’s still interesting, because it tells us there’s something important that we haven’t accounted for properly.

  • My Typical Day:

    Mostly I am just sitting in front of a computer! First I check the new science articles to see if there’s anything new and exciting. Then normally I’m writing python programs to make measurements of the galaxies in our simulations, and looking at the results to see how accurate our simulations are. Now that we’re all working from home, I have lots of virtual meetings with other scientists where we talk about the research we’re working on.

  • My Interview

    • What did you want to be after you left school?

      I remember wanting to work in renewable energy, perhaps with wind or wave energy

      Were you ever in trouble at school?

      Lots! I always talked too much in class.

      Who is your favourite singer or band?

      All Time Low

      What's your favourite food?

      Chocolate buttons

      Tell us a joke.

      Did you hear about the man who got cooled to absolute zero? He's 0K now.

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