Profile

I live in Manchester with my girlfriend. I enjoy cooking, sport, reading, games, music, and dungeons and dragons. Maybe that can be summed up as liking stories (and eating tasty food!). My favourite film is Sharknado. My favourite game is probably Minecraft! I can play the piano, and am currently learning the Minecraft music.

My work is really about answering questions about particle physics – in this case about the neutrino, which is a tiny particle which is released by radioactive materials. They don’t really do anything – billions of them pass through you every second without touching you. However, they do weird stuff which challenges how we think about the universe, so we need to study them.

One way to do this is to look at the radioactive decays where they appear. This is complicated because you then need to know what the atoms are doing. This is my job! To try and work that out, I try and change the atoms slightly, by adding or taking away stuff from them. You do this by hitting them with other atoms from a particle accelerator beam. We can then measure how easy it is to do this, which tells us about what the inside of the atoms looks like.

Experiments at my work don’t happen that often. In the first year of my PhD, I got all the data that I needed in 2 experiments. Those took place in Munich over a week. I had to do the night shifts! We had to control the particle accelerator, mostly by changing magnetic field settings or by changing what material we were studying.

Most of the time since then has been spent analysing these data! It takes a long time, because what you see are lots of different energy states that the atoms that we’re studying get put into, and I need to look at each one of these. I’ve also spent a lot of time making something that does this for you, so that me and other people don’t need to take so long doing this.