Profile

I live in Edinburgh with my boyfriend. I have been in the UK for 5 years, but am originally from Barcelona in Spain. I have lived in a few countries: Germany, where I studied Engineering, and Sweden and the USA where I did semesters abroad during my studies. Apart from travelling and getting to know new places and people, and most importantly their food, I like spending time outside hiking, cycling, or doing new things.

In my work I help develop offshore renewable energy technologies, like wave energy, tidal energy and offshore wind energy, so that we can use them to generate electricity at low cost.

In the picture you can see an offshore wind farm which is near Aberdeen in Scotland. Offshore wind turbines are very large, and they can be as tall as the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

When these wind turbines are offshore, they need to be attached to the seabed through a foundation system, it can be fixed with a pile or floating on a platform using mooring lines.  I work on my computer, with which I can say how the platform needs to look like so that the turbine can work while staying in place. I also study how much building these turbines cost, how they impact the environment and how they can benefit people living near them – since they can then work for example on fabricating these turbines or maintaining them once they are installed apart from getting electricity from them.

In a normal day in my role, I will most likely be in the office with my colleagues developing or applying models to design or evaluate new offshore wind and wave energy solutions. I will then put together reports or presentations to share my progress with partners or colleagues, or write scientific papers to share the research with the wider community working on offshore renewable energy. Since I work with international partners, I might have a conference call or two, or a meeting with my colleagues to discuss our work progress and how to approach the next challenge. During the semester, I might also meet with Masters students that I supervise for their final year projects. Sometimes, I will travel to conferences to share my work with the offshore renewable energy community and learn about the research and progress they have achieved. Sometimes, I also travel to project meetings – since I work in projects with many partners (companies, universities, etc.) from around the world. In those meetings we discuss the progress and future work plans for a project.

For the last year, I have been working from home, since my job is computer based and I do not need to go to a laboratory to do experiments or to the university to teach.