About me

Physicist & entrepreneur

I received a 1st class MSci (4-yr combined BSc & MSc) degree in Physics from Imperial College, with a final year project and UROP summer project specialising in building diode pumped solid state lasers from scratch with Prof. Damzen's group. 

Between 2010-2012 I worked at the Advanced Technology Centre at BAE Systems working on R&D for optical fibres deployed in Eurofighter, MEMS pH sensors, and project management/bidding. 

In 2012 -2016 I completed a Ph.D. at University College London titled 'Cooling & sensing using whispering gallery mode resonators' where picometer displacements of a glass microsphere could be measured optomechanically. Using this transduction, feedback cooling was successfully achieved (removing mechanical motion from the glass sphere) although still many orders away from creating a macroscopic quantum object (like a giant atom in its centre-of-mass quantum ground state). 

Since 2016 I have been progressing with starting a spin-out company enabling commercialisation of whispering gallery mode sensors. I was invited to join the Nature/EF Innovation Forum with a subsequent Nature Nanotechnology article on my commercialisation goals.  I was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize fellowship in 2017 to develop my Ph.D. experiment as a micro-g accelerometer capable of measuring the change in Earth's gravitational field due to the motion of the moon! This was prototyped and field-tested in Sept 2017. 

I am a member of the Institute of Physics and the Optical Society of America.

Science communicator

Whilst working at BAE Systems I began my journey into science communication, starting with an Ignite talk in Bristol (similar to a TED talk). It was titled 'Stop asking for a lightsaber' in response to numerous requests for a non-existent (yet) weapon! You can view it here. My love of talking about physics and making awful jokes continued throughout the first two years of my Ph.D. and led to a place on the UK Famelab finals; you can view my audition tape here and my talk at the Royal Institution here. 

In 2012 I was honoured to become a ScienceGrrl and half of 'Miss January' alongside Dr. Ceri Brenner. I continue to promote women in STEM through running the Women in Physics Group at UCL, including holding Wikithons!

Science/Art

I am fascinated with using lasers as textures in art. In 2012 I collaborated with Gyrogy Laszlo, a photographer and cinematographer to create exquisite photos of lasers and fluorescence. See the Flickr album here.