Speaker profile

Summary

I am a Stephen Hawking Fellow at the University of Warwick. Before then I had a highly unusual career path, which combined academia, submarines, and industry. I work on planets, asteroids and comets around stars, as well as delivering outreach.

Full biography

I am a Stephen Hawking Fellow at the University of Warwick. I joined in 2023, after an unusual career path that combined academia, submarines, and industry.

My work focuses on 'debris discs', which are discs of asteroids and comets around stars. The Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt in our Solar System are examples of debris discs, and we see similar discs around other stars too. My job is to interpret what these belts tell us about exoplanets, and about how planetary systems form and evolve. My work is mainly theory and computer simulations, but, I am very involved in observations too; I lead a programme on the James Webb Space Telescope, and am very involved in ground-based instruments like ALMA.

I had an unusual career path. After a Master's degree at Durham and a PhD at Cambridge, I left academia and was selected to be an officer in the Royal Navy. I underwent extensive training in leadership, management, communication and engineering before joining a nuclear submarine as an engineering officer. After several years I left to become Lead Mathematical Developer at an industry-leading software-development firm, specialising in traffic modelling. I returned to academia in December 2019 as a postdoctoral researcher in Jena, Germany, before joining Warwick in Nov 2023 as a Prize Fellow, then as a Stephen Hawking Fellow in May 2024.

Affiliations