Profile

My days at work are mainly spent doing three things: reading scientific papers, coding and drinking coffee.

As a PhD student, you still have a lot to learn, so there is a seemingly endless supply of papers to read so you can learn about what other people have already done in your field.

My PhD involves modelling physical systems using a computer. To do this, I work on writing my own code and adapting existing code to my project (primarily in Python and Fortran with the odd dash of C/C++). Unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a programmer must spend approximately 95% of their time debugging, so a large part of this time is spent trying to figure out why my code is not doing what I want it to and attempting to remedy this. When my code does work, it can produce pretty images of swirling fluid like this:

I fuel my reading and coding by drinking a lot of coffee (spot the espresso machine next to my desk in the photo below!).

When I’m not doing science / drinking coffee, I sing in a choir, play guitar, bake/eat lots of cake, attempt to learn languages (currently French, German and Welsh) and have recently started taekwondo. I also somehow find the time to watch plenty of Netflix.