Profile

I’m a mechanical engineer. In my job I have designed things like escape systems for underground trains, playground equipment, water features for the London 2012 Olympics…. and I had my own business for 5 years!

I use engineering to help people and improve the world.

I love cycling. When it’s wet outside, I have a spin bike in my garage and cycle in a virtual world called Zwift. It’s like playing a computer game, but you exercise at the same time. Since starting, I have climbed 50,000m and have won a virtual bike with glowing wheels 😁​

Here’s me riding my virtual bike:

As a lecturer I have to prepare 1 hour lessons for my students. The subject I teach is engineering management. This mostly involves looking at engineering disasters and working out what went wrong. We then try and work out what we can do better as engineers, to avoid disasters happening in the future.

With my research I get to come up with ideas and then carry out experiments to see if they work or not. Either way, I write up my findings and share them with the world. This way we can all work together to make progress in science and engineering.

I am currently designing man-made houses for bumblebees. This is so we can monitor their behaviour and learn more about them. I also want to put the bee houses in areas where the bees’ natural habitat has been destroyed. This will help encourage them to live in that area and help people who are growing crops. Bees are very important pollinators, we need bees to make some crops grow! If we don’t have bees then we might not be able to grow food, which leaves people poor or hungry.

Here’s a version of our BeeBox with a Raspberry Pi camera inside connected to the tv screen behind: