Profile

I live in Newcastle, where I enjoy living in a city, but am able to go out to the coast whenever I want. In particular, I love going for bike rides, watersports (including SCUBA diving, scanning, sailing), and climbing.

Pronouns are he/him.

I mostly work in the laboratory with a 7m long wave tank, producing something called Internal Solitary Waves. These form in the water column on a density interface, similar to if you have oil and water and they have a boundary between them.

My days vary a lot, when I’m in the lab, I get up early and cycle to the lab, and immediately get the day’s experiment started before changing into my lab gear, because an experiment takes the full day to complete!

The experiments involve slowly filling a tank by dripping water through some sponges, to make sure that the water doesn’t mix with the layer below it. It takes about 2 hours to add about 7cm of water, so it is very slow. At about midday I’m ready to run the experiment, so I have to check all my computers are working and set up correctly, as I don’t want anything to go wrong after spending all day setting up. Then, I release the gate at the end of the tank, and sit and watch as a day’s work goes into a wave that travels from one end of the tank to the other in about 2 minutes.

The lab’s a very messy place, so I then have to spend the rest of the day clearing away, and getting ready for the next day’s experiment.

Other days, I work from the office, often this involves reading and looking at the results of my experiments, and sometimes meeting with lots of other staff to make sure I can do my work well.