Profile

I’ve only been out of university for two years and now I’m putting my degree to use! When I’m not at work I like to travel the world and, when I don’t have any money left for traveling, I play games on my PS4. I might occasionally fix bicycles, cars or motorbikes. I’m also an active STEM ambassador, currently helping out at Science Oxford’s “Ideas to Inventions” sessions and last year I ran a Code Club for a local primary school.

The science experiment I work on is called the Joint European Torus (JET). JET is a nuclear fusion reactor where a few milligrams of fuel gas can be heated up to temperatures over 150 million degrees Celsius. At these high temperatures, nuclear fusion occurs and our fuel gas joins together into a different type of gas. This process releases a lot of energy but it takes a lot of energy to get the gas up to such a high temperature! The aim of fusion research now is to get more energy out than you put in.

I’m an electrical engineer; so I look after the same kind of things you might find in your house, just bigger. I mostly work with something called amplifiers which turn a very small electronic signal into a big, controlled, power signal. This is the same sort of thing you would find that powers your speakers at home, either in your computer, phone, tablet or hi-fi system attached to your TV. But the amplifiers I work with can provide a lot of power so they take up a lot of space, the best part of a warehouse!

These amplifiers make up a part of the overall power supplies. The rest of the power supplies includes big transformers, big circuit breakers, two on-site flywheel generators and some really big switches. They’re all required to make JET work!

I have several typical days, I could be: running the power supplies from the control room, fixing problems, investigating problems, testing parts or designing something new. I could even be getting greasy performing yearly maintenance.

Science Oxford is my local STEMNET branch which I volunteer as a STEM ambassador through. STEM means Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

As I am already going out to schools for outreach I feel the best use of this money would be equipment for outreach clubs and the creative computing club being developed by Science Oxford looks great. It gives children aged 11-16 the opportunity to experience what technology can do. They focus on the use of Arduino microcontrollers which allow you to write code to interact with the real world.