I joined the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and piCETL (Leicester) in 2008. As a full-time Teaching Fellow I have a variety of roles within the Centre including course development, teaching, outreach and course promotion, as well as a spot of website maintenance on the side! 

I graduated from the University of Leicester with a MPhys Physics with Astrophysics (Hons) degree and then a PhD in X-Ray Astronomy; so I am very familiar with the local teaching ethos and PBL methodology used in the Centre having participated in PBL as an undergraduate and then having helped facilitate during my PhD years.

My PhD was carried out within the XROA group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Leicester. My research involved working as part of an international collaboration to analyse data from extremely violent extra-galactic explosions called Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). The majority of my research revolved around the NASA mission called Swift. During the earlier part of my PhD I was also a Leicester 'Burst Advocate' and occasionally helped with 'X-Ray Burst Scientist' duties. My thesis was was entitled "Gamma Ray Bursts: Selected Results From The Swift Mission".

Whilst my previous academic studies appear to have been very narrowly focussed in the area of astrophysics I am interested in a broad range of scientific subjects, especially those that require interdisciplinary research (such as biorobotics; the study of biologically inspired machines). I feel that the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and the opportunities connected with it (such as the iTeach initiative) will allow me to convey my enthusiasm with regards to science to a wide audience.

Outside of academia my interests include; creative writing, digital graphics and costume design. In the past I was also a keen archer and was selected on several occasions to represent my County.

 Publications

For my first author papers listed on the NASA Astrophysics Data System click here.

For my full list of publications (including co-author papers) listed on the NASA Astrophysics Data System click here.

Thesis

"Gamma Ray Bursts: Selected Results From The Swift Mission"

Abstract:

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are short, energetic events that mark the most violent explosions in the Universe. Current hypotheses associate them with the births of stellar-sized black holes or rapidly spinning, highly magnetized stars. The introduction to this work places GRBs in their historical and theoretical context and provides a description of the current models describing them. This study makes use of data from the Swift satellite. Chapter two is a multi-wavelength study of the high redshift GRB 050505, which indicates that this burst has properties consistent with the general lower z GRB sample. Furthermore there is evidence for a 'jet-break' in the X-ray light curve; a phenomena rarely seen in Swift era bursts. The next two chapters investigate the presence of X-ray emission lines in GRB spectra. Chapter three provides a discussion of the pre-Swift observations and a comparison of three methods already extant in the literature for assessing the significance of such spectral features. The detection limits for each method were determined for emission line strengths in bursts with spectral parameters typical of the Swift era sample. Chapter four applies these methods to a sampel of 40 Swift bursts; no strong evidence was found for emission lines in early time X-ray spectra once host galaxy absorption was accurately modelled. Chapter five investigates the phenomena of 'precursors' and 'quiescent intervals', indicating a common origin for events normally ascribed to 'prompt emission' and 'flares', in line with previous studies, and extending it to cover 'precursor' emission. Evidence was also found to reinforce (anti-)correlations seen between pulse temporal and energetic properties also seen in previous studies. The final chapter summarises the important results for each section and proposes future studies that could be conducted in each field.

Declarations and List of Contents

Chapter 01: Introduction

Chapter 02: GRB 050505: A high redshift burst detected by Swift

Chapter 03: Line Searches in Swift X-ray Spectra: Methods

Chapter 04: Line Searches in Swift X-ray Spectra: Results and Conclusions

Chapter 05: Precursors and long quiescent times in Swift GRBs

Chapter 06: Summary and Future Work

Bibliography