Profile

I was born in South Africa and moved to Ireland when I was 11. I’m a collector of strange languages, fluent in Afrikaans and English with a pretty good level of Irish and German. If I’m not working, you’ll usually find me outside on a bike or a kayak or a windsurfing rig, but since we’ve all been stuck inside recently, I’ve found myself playing a lot more video games (especially Civ V) and doing more arts and crafts (like making Aloy’s bow from Horizon Zero Dawn).

For the majority of my life, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I was older. For my leaving certificate in Ireland (equivalent to A-levels in the UK) I chose a wide range of subjects including physics, geography and art. As soon as I heard about engineering, something clicked and I knew that was what I wanted to do! Even though I didn’t do very well in maths in school, I studied aeronautical engineering and then moved on to astronautics and space engineering. Now I’m working with a great team of scientists and engineers to develop drag sails. If you send a satellite up to space, it’ll stay there for many, many years, even after you’ve stopped using it, unless you do something to help it de-orbit. We don’t want the satellite to stay in orbit after its finished its mission since it could crash into other satellites and damage them. Therefore, we’re trying to encourage satellites to attach folded-up sails (like the ones in the images below), which they can deploy when they no longer need the satellite to remove the satellite from space.

As part of my PhD, I have a long check-list of things I’d like to do in my 3 years. At the start of the week, I sit down and think about what I’d like to get done that week. At the moment, that’s a bit of lab work, trying to test a new design we’ve been working on, and a bit of writing. It’s very important for engineers and scientist to share their work so that it can help other people too. That’s why lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my time writing papers for conferences. Not the most exciting work, but part of the job! Since I don’t have a very rigid schedule, it means I can do volunteering work with UKSEDS (UK Students for the Exploration and Development Exploration of Space) during my day too, so some days you’ll find me designing a logo or helping organise a rocketry competition!

Each year, students at Cranfield University take part in competitions to build and test rovers, satellites and rockets! They learn a lot when they’re competing and I’m sure more people outside of the University would enjoy seeing their projects. I would set up the grant to help them host events where they can show their projects to local school students and the surrounding general public, hopefully encouraging them to become involved in STEM projects too!