Profile

I live with my partner – we just moved to a new house a couple of months ago and we’re expecting our first child in February so life is going to change a lot in the future! Ordinarily I love travelling and exploring and normally find somewhere exciting to go on holiday – 2020 has been a bit different! In my free time I like climbing and cycling when the weather is nice, and reading when it’s raining!

Since starting work I’ve always tried to have a balance of different types of work. I love doing ‘number crunching’ – running computer models and analysing data. However, I also get lots of satisfaction from understanding the bigger picture and writing ‘safety cases’ – these draw together different bits of evidence to demonstrate that the reactor is safe to operate.

I start work at 7.30am as I’m working from home so I just need to roll out of bed and I’m in the office! This means I can finish work at 4pm and I have the rest of the evening to myself.

I work in an engineering consultancy and I’m normally working on a couple of different projects at the same time, as well as mentoring people, which means my day is always pretty varied. There is normally a couple of meetings with different industry experts – no one works in isolation so it’s good to get different opinions from lots of different people. Sometimes these meetings involve chasing people if they are late get information to you.

I normally try to keep a few hours aside for technical work (otherwise you spend your whole day talking to people and not actually getting anything done!). This might be thinking really hard about a problem, or something a bit more routine such as inspecting some computer code for bugs.

My group has a tea break together every other day so that we keep in touch even though we are working remotely. When we were in the office this would happen every day at 10am – we would all go off to the kitchen for a good chat and a break away from work!