Profile

I live just outside Bristol. When I’m not working I like food (to be honest I like food all the time)

My favourite summer snack!

(when we’re not staying at home!) I like going to the mountains or to the sea.

I like to climb things to see the view from the top…

I love the sea!

While we’re home, I’m going on bike rides around my village and learning how to grow food in our new garden. I’m also practising handstands and cartwheels, by the time I go back to work, I want to be able to walk on my hands.

My secret talent!

When I think nobody can hear me I sing to myself, and I eat chocolate every single day.

I work at the SS Great Britain, which was the world’s first metal ship, designed in Victorian times by a famous engineer called Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

At the time she was the biggest ship in the world, and took thousands of people to Australia. After sailing for nearly 100 years the ship got damaged and abandoned in the Falkland Islands, near Argentina and Antarctica, 8000 miles from Bristol! In 1970 the ship got rescued and brought all the way back so people can visit and go aboard to find out what life was like for the Victorians sailing to Australia.

But the metal is really old and when taken out of the water it started rusting really quickly – the only way to stop this is to keep the metal really, really dry. The ship is in a dock but we’ve built a glass roof so the ship looks like it’s floating but underneath we keep the air next to the metal as dry as the Arizona desert.

My job as the ship’s conservation engineer is to look after the ship, and that means looking after the equipment that dries the air and sends it all around the ship, making sure it’s doing the best job possible. I also work with the computer code that controls the system to see if we can keep the ship dry using less gas and electricity so our carbon footprint gets smaller. I’m also responsible for the temperature and humidity for displaying and storing all other objects we have in the museum too.

In my last job I made computer simulations of the temperatures of different bits inside nuclear reactors, to help make sure power stations stayed safe!

I cycle to work and get there at about 9, then check on the computers and the machines to make sure everything is working properly and all temperatures and humidities are nice and stable. Sometimes I collect data from the machines to learn more about exactly what each bit is doing, which helps us fix any problems and we’re also working on calculations to help reduce the amount of gas and electricity the drying uses.

I have lots of sensors around the ship monitoring how dry different locations are, some days I move the sensors around to check new locations, and some days I’ll go and have a good look at the ship (a “condition check”) and take photos so we can keep an eye on whether any of the rust is getting worse.

I’ll have meetings with different groups of people at the museum to keep up-to-date with any new activities or exhibitions, how many visitors are coming or any other exciting events coming up on the ship. Sometimes a group visit will want some specific information about science, engineering or looking after the ship so it’s my job to get that information for them, sometimes I do a lecture or a tour to talk about it, or I give the information to our official tour guides.

I also talk to researchers at universities who might be helping with some calculations, or people who work at other museums to compare notes on how we’re looking after all of the objects in our displays and in storage and share any tips and tricks on new techniques or energy-saving.