Profile

I’m a physicist! I have worked all around the world playing with the world’s largest magnets, but returned back to the Midlands to become a lecturer at the University of Warwick. I’ve done experiments on tiny specks of superconducting material, small magnets, and long lengths of railway track.

I live in Coventry with my husband and our two children (aged 5 and nearly 1), plus many cuddly toy dogs. I love juggling and sewing, and cartoons – and I read Beano every week! I have a different Spongebob t-shirt for every lecture I give.

I’m really short – I’m about the size of an 11-year old. This means I get away with being very over-enthusiastic about science when I’m teaching. It also makes it fun visiting schools, and showing them that scientists come in all shapes and sizes.

Have you ever shouted into a cave or a large echoey room, and listened for the echoes? That’s what I do! Except I use ultrasound, which is sound that’s such a high note that we can’t hear it. If you measure how long it takes for the echo to come back to you, and you know how fast it has travelled, you can work out how far it travelled. This means you can do things like finding out how far away the back of the cave is – or, if you send sound through something like a metal pipe or a bit of railway track, you can find out where there are any problems like cracking.

My research groups likes finding new ways of using sound to find things, but also new ways of making or listening for sounds. At the moment we’re using liquid crystals, which are a really unusual material, to make a paint that lets you “see” sound.

My morning is a frantic rush of getting one child off to school, and one off to nursery. Then I head over to my lab at the university. I spend some of my time teaching physics to our undergraduates, and at the moment I’m teaching about how different materials behave (like metals and semiconductors). If I’m lucky I’ll get to spend some of my time in the lab doing experiments, or thinking about what we can invent next.

I spend some of my day talking with my PhD students about what they’re working on. I write papers to tell other researchers about what we’re doing, and write applications to get in money to do more research.

Sometimes I get to go and visit a school to tell people about how fun science can be. I have a second job at the university which is encouraging all of our researchers to go and talk with the public about what we do, and to see how they can work with the public to help them to do their own research. I finish at about 5pm so I can get to nursery and after school club before they close!