Profile

My work is varied, exciting, interesting, demanding, rewarding and it’s great fun.

I love what I do and currently run my own engineering consulting business. With that comes the opportunity to travel to many different manufacturing sites and locations and I get to meet hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. Materials and manufacturing processes fascinate me and my work is all about making sure we get safe and efficient products to a global market within set deadlines.

The way we engineer things can be fascinating or extraordinary and at times it’s quite simple. Did you know the UPVC (unplasticised polyvinyl chloride) window factories work in much the same way as a Play-Doh factory?

Currently I’m working for a client in Gatwick and Germany. We make medical equipment and linear accelerators (linacs) are the largest machines we make here; they are huge!

Linacs are used by Radiotherapists or Radiation Oncologists (cancer doctors) in hospitals and specialist centres, for the delivery of therapy in treating people with cancer.

The therapists plan the treatment using a simulator and images from X-rays and scans to help them ‘mark the spot’ on the patient’s skin, with coloured pens and dyes so they can carefully deliver direct beams of radiation at tumors. This radiation is accurately produced, monitored and controlled by the Linac which helps to damage beyond repair, or kill, the bad cells, while avoiding healthy tissue.

This all happens with the patient lying still on a special bed (we make those too,) while beams move around and penetrate from outside the body. This is called external beamtherapy and it’s not invasive at all.

The treatment is totally painless and the patient can usually go home afterwards.

What I also love about my job is the way things work and these machines work as if by magic. This is better than magic though, we are helping people and I enjoy working as an engineer.

If you want to know the secrets of the linac, you can find them here: 

Gamma Knife Hat

About Me:

“They told me engineers can’t be creative!”

Welsh poet
Lyricist
Learning to play guitar – Ouch!
Photographer
Artist
@isomedlimited

My Life 2011

My Art 2012
Lou Talbert – Ranch Outfitters

…they just don’t exist.

It’s very cold standing in a freezer first thing in the morning at -40° and you can feel your eyelashes and hairs in your nose starting to freeze. It’s a little scary, like a horror movie, because you’re locked inside. It’s safe though; so they tell me.

I didn’t like it very much, but it was interesting to learn about the storage of antidotes for possible chemical attacks, by terrorists.

Days for me can start out anywhere in the world, it always depends where the next job is. Currently I’m based in Crawley, England and next month I’ll be in Schwabmünchen, Germany. We have forty offices in different countries, so there’s a lot of opportunity at Elekta and especially for engineers in general.

Typical daily tasks for Regulatory Professionals include, but are not limited to:

Breakfast in the canteen;
Conference calls to government officials all over the world;
Understanding and communicating law and complicated instructions;
Reviewing brochures and user guides;
Meetings;
Design reviews;
Software reviews;
Incident reporting;
Technical writing;
Risk analysis;
Planning;
Asking lots of questions;
Reading, reading; and
Did I mention reading?

I enjoy doing lots of different things and one day I might be working on a design file for a brand new product; the next I could be blowing things up in a laboratory. I love chocolate machine shops and production, so whenever I get the opportunity to make improvements to processes and systems, that’s where you’ll find me.