Profile

I have THE best job.

My PhD involves analysing observations made using the world’s most sophisticated telescopes, such as the VLT (Very Large Telescope) in Chile. The light from distant stars takes a really long time to reach us here on Earth, so as we’re delving deeper into space we’re actually looking further and further back in time too! I’ve always found that amazing. We can glimpse what the Universe was like billions of years ago, and ‘play detective’ – piecing together clues to figure out how it eventually came to look like what we see today.

I’m most interested in distant galaxies, which can look a lot different to the Milky Way – our ‘home’ galaxy. Some are forming stars in spectacular, violent bursts; some colliding with each other in a beautiful but destructive dance across the sky. Others pile material on to ‘supermassive’ black holes at their centre, releasing huge amounts of energy. Using state of the art telescopes and new techniques, we can now see galaxies as they were 10 billion years ago in incredible detail. To put this in perspective – the time since dinosaurs roamed the Earth is less than 1% of this!

Top left: Meeting Brian Cox on the set of BBC Stargazing Live
Top right: Getting started early with a solar telescope
Bottom: The VLT at Paranal, Chile. Image courtesy of ESO.

My typical day is spent in the office – analysing data, reading, learning, and trying to make sense of it all. There’s always plenty of laughing and chatting with my office-mates though too. Our white board often has pictures of dinosaurs alongside the spectra and serious equations! Things don’t always go to plan in research, but I love the challenge of figuring out how to make my code work, problem solving and thinking on my feet. It’s worth it ten times over when you get those results out.

One of the things I like most about astronomy is being a part of this great network of people, all striving together to find something new. Every week we have guest speakers from all over the world coming to share their work with us. It’s a fantastic way to learn about inspiring new developments, and means we get to travel a lot too.

My research is all the more exciting in that I have opportunity to use telescopes in exotic places. Observing at the VLT in August was an unbelievable trip! Experiencing science at its most cutting-edge, studying what others may never have looked at before – that will never get old for me.

Left: Me inside one of the telescopes at the VLT. Nice hat?

Right: One of my favourite images. Each different coloured object is a galaxy, but the image only covers one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. Imagine how many galaxies there are in total! Courtesy of NASA / Hubble Ultra Deep Field.