Profile

I’m a PhD student at the University of Surrey within the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing. I graduated from the University of Leicester with an MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and was awarded a prize for being the highest achieving student among my peers.

My research is in PET imaging where patients breathing during a scan can cause severe problems with the image quality (like leaving your camera exposure on too long). I’m currently using Kinect to watch a patient’s breathing motion and using that information to correct the data that comes directly off a scan.

If I’m not in my office I’m getting involved in various widening participation and engagement activities with other young people interested in the engineering sciences.

My typical day depends on the day in which you ask me! First thing I do most days when I get in is sit down check emails, guzzle myself a coffee and get cracking! Most days I’ll be at my desk, writing code to handle medical imaging data, process it, analyse it and generally help me with my research. If I’m not busy handling existing data, then I’m at a nearby hospital gathering more new data! Given how little time we get up there as other patients need the scanner, we have to carefully plan our experiments and arrive bright and early that morning raring to go and get everything set up as quick as possible! We go in with all of our equipment, cameras, laptop etc. and get it set up as quick as possible and perform the experiment!

If I’m not researching then I’m engaging with young people of various ages at various stages through their careers. I go to schools frequently to help young people learn computer programming while supporting their teachers as they adapt to the new Computer curriculum schools are required to teach now.

A lot of the engagement I participate in is through a Coding Club that I help run at the University of Surrey. I frequently go out to schools to help teachers and pupils alike learn the art of computer programming. However we do not have a health of resources at our disposal so I’m limited in what type of content I can deliver to people or the amount of people I can deliver to at any one time.

If I were to win, I’d use the money to invest in some additional resources such as Arduino kits and Raspberry Pi kits which I can use to deliver more innovative and exciting sessions and also teach more people at once.