Profile

I left school having studied maths, physics  and art at A-level. I have always had wide range of interests, the main one being how things worked (it still is). I didn’t find maths easy by any means at school and was something I really had to work at in order to do the things I wanted, but is now something I use every day and actually enjoy (honestly!). I also really enjoy making things and I do as much of that as I can outside of my job. I spend a lot of my free time fixing up my house and building a sports car from used parts from other worn out cars.

I’m also a bit of an adrenaline junkie and I enjoy mountain biking – particularly out in Wales when I get the chance! I also enjoy skiing and I’ve had a go at rock climbing, abseiling, and a brief taste of flying a very small plane. There’s lots of competition for my free time!

I have always been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, and studied Maths, Physics and Art for my A-levels. I knew for a quite a while that I wanted to be an engineer and I went on to study automotive engineering at university, as I particularly enjoy combining creativity and knowledge of how things work, to create new things and improve existing ones.

I have been working as an engineer for about 9 years now and I’ve had a lot of variety in my work. Some of it has been hands-on testing and some of it has been design and calculations, which is now my main speciality.

I have performed experiments on fuel injector sprays, using laser sheets and high speed cameras to measure the size of fuel droplets within different parts of the spray and I have designed parts which operate at very high speeds and temperatures inside engines. Almost every day is different, and I’m now enjoying the challenge of developing new technology for a re-usable space plane. One day we hope this plane will rival Elon Musk’s rockets!

As a structural engineer I’m part of a team that is responsible for designing parts of a rocket engine being as light as possible, but strong enough to withstand large forces and very high temperatures. I also assist fault investigations when things have broken or not worked as the team expected.

I have to work with lots of other people to make this happen as we are taking initial ideas about how the engine will work, and then developing these ideas to actually make them a reality. We have to consider lots of things to make this happen – from how the size and weight of our parts will affect other parts in the engine, to how we will actually make and put everything together.

Once we’ve made the parts, we then have to test the parts to see how they will work in the actual vehicle, so we get to see if we got our calculations correct – sometimes if we don’t it can go spectacularly wrong, often referred to as a “rapid, unscheduled disassembly!”.

Coming up with new ideas, and trying to make sure everyone’s ideas all fit together and work during testing is extremely challenging. It does mean there is a great mix of teamwork and difficult problems to solve, and seeing your ideas become a reality is fantastic!

I would use the money to buy an action camera to film a water bottle rocket project, in which I would make a water bottle rocket from scrap / recycled parts and then mount the camera to it, recording how high it goes. The video series would include an explanation of how you can  calculate how high it should be able to fly (based on the size, shape and weight, the air pressure and how much water is in it), and how to increase this as much as possible!