Profile

Hello! I live in Guildford, and I love to paint! I’ve attached a painting below of an unnecessarily moody sea. When my hand’s aren’t covered in acrylic paint I also take part in politics and activism. Just like you (I hope!), I’m worried about climate change so I try to do as much as I can to make sure our future and our planet is safe! I also do stand-up comedy which is often about SCIENCE! Writing jokes is a great excuse to research into other areas of science and find out more ridiculous facts about the universe.

I look at mathematical models of real life things, and then I try to build upon them. The particular model I am looking at is Brownian motion – that’s the random motion of a particle (like how smoke particles move in the air).

Quantum mechanics is a mathematical model to try and understand the super small, atoms and beyond. Quantum Brownian motion is the random motion of these very small things. If I can prove that weird quantum behaviour is happening at that level, and that living things are using this weird quantum-ness then I get a big thumbs up from my supervisor (my boss) and that’s a scientific result!

The reality of doing this is writing code. In the same way a sheepdog helps a shepard, my computer is my faithful metal doggo who chases after mathematical equations instead of tennis balls. I give the computer some maths that I have worked out, and then the computer crunches the numbers (and the symbols) and gives me pictures, solutions, and information about the physics!

I get in at 10am, turn on my PC and check the results of the simulations and models that my code produced overnight. If the results are good then I’ll write up my analysis and think about the implications are for my research. If the results are BAD (which they often are) then I figure out what has gone wrong. Often you realise that you’ve made a silly mistake and you correct it. Every theoretical physicist I know is worried, in some way, that they missed something stupid months ago and that all their work could be nonsense because of it.

I will then correct my errors, produce plots, and put them into my thesis (a thesis is a big document that PhD’s have to hand in at the end of the degree). I often do other things in my work – I am on the University’s Sustainability Steering group,  I am president of the Uniersity’s Postgraduate Society, and I help train other academics to do stand-up comedy for a science comedy event called Bright Club!