Profile

I live in Hinckly with my partner, I attend the university of Leicester while he attends Warwick university. I have a ridiculously extensive knowledge of Friends, Simpsons, Futurama, Red dwarf and Harry Potter.

I am an avid gamer, me and my partner play lots of co-op games such as Portal 2, Mario party, and Age of Empires in our spare time and I play single player games like Fallout and Oxygen Not Included. When you are doing a PhD its important to have down time! I also like to crochet gamer toys (Yoshi, 1-up mario mushrooms, planets etc) and I used to do archery.

I am currently in the fourth year of my PhD so I’m writing up all my work into a massive book we call a thesis. I think that outreach is an important part of being a researcher, there is so much information that is hidden from people in papers that are very complicated and have special words only scientists will understand. Talking to people about that work makes it less mystical and includes the general public and encourages interest in science from a younger age.

I think that I’m a Scientist is a fantastic idea, when I was young I often had questions about science and technology and googling them often brought me to wiki pages I didn’t understand. Now that i’m older and I finally understand more of these things I want to be able to explain them to people and make science more approachable for everyone.

The proper term for the type of PhD i’m doing is Theoretical Astrophysics. It sounds very complicated and posh but its actually not.

Astrophysics is the term we use for people who study things on a big scale, such as planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe. Theoretical just means that I don’t use a telescope or pictures of these objects, I use computers to make pretend versions of stars and planets (called simulations) and see how they behave.

My current work is on what we call ‘Evolved stars’. When stars, like our Sun, get old and run out of fuel they expand into a big ‘Giant’ (the size is close to the orbit of the Sun around the Earth!) and then shrink into a little ‘White Dwarf’ which are the size of Earth but very dense, and very hot. All sorts of interesting things happen when stars die, not only to them but to any planets they have and its an interesting field of research.

I am currently finishing up some work on these white dwarfs that have ‘brown dwarfs’ near them (brown dwarfs are failed stars, they didn’t have enough mass to start fusing to make energy, so they are kind of like very very big planets)

My day isn’t very rigidly set.

I am currently putting my research in to two papers that will hopefully be published (I have one published already so I hope to have a total of three published papers when I finish my PhD).

I spend the majority of my work day writing up all the work I did during my PhD into these papers and my thesis. I will eventually have to defend my research to a panel of specialists and if I pass I will receive my doctorate.