Profile

I grew up in Birmingham, where I first got interested in science by learning about engineering at school. I moved up to Edinburgh to start my PhD in 2016, where I live with my girlfriend and our many plants.

I keep my brain happy with video games and exercise.  I go to the gym as often as I can to stay healthy, and I love climbing. Here’s me doing some bouldering in Edinburgh

I get to do lots of travelling for work, which I try to make the most of. This year I’ve been hiking in Colorado and travelled around Japan, which was great fun! Here I am standing in front of a huge temple in Kyoto

My favourite superhero is Spider-man, and I love to argue about what the best Star Wars film is 🙂

Quantum mechanics is the way we understand how atoms behave, interact with each other, or even exist at all. Everything we see is made of atoms, so we need quantum mechanics to understand why the world around us acts the way that it does. The problem with that is that doing a quantum calculation of any realistic material is really, really difficult.

That’s where supercomputers come in. These big, powerful computers let us make predictions about the properties of real materials, and understand some of the bizarre things they might do when people make them for real in the lab. Will it be a conductor or an insulator? A solid or a liquid? Is it magnetic? What colour is it? We need quantum mechanics to answer all of these questions.

And we can do all of this from a laptop! Computational scientists connect to supercomputers through the internet, and send calculations for them to do remotely. So we can do science anywhere in the world.

All of my work happens from my laptop, so I work from home a lot.  I try to break up my day with going to the gym or climbing. I usually run big calculations overnight, so I spend my day checking the results of these calculations and setting up new ones.

When I go into the office, I usually have some meetings where I get to discuss the work that me and my colleagues are doing. It’s always fun to hear about what other people are working on, and to hear different perspectives on my work! I also often have meetings with experimental physicists, where we can help one another understand each others results.