SAM MORRELL

Chirp has a New Home

At the end of 2019, I posted about a little app that my colleagues and the University of Birmingham and I had been working on called Chirp — a web and iOS app for keeping track of the latest gravitational wave alerts. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down LIGO, and Chirp, but now it’s coming back...

About Me

I am a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, currently applying my training in astrophysics to help better understand, and hopefully begin to solve, the pressing ecological crisis caused by artificial light at night (ALAN). I lead the development of our Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer model, whose outputs we correlate with measurements of animal...

Web Development for Physicists

I’m fortunate enough to be sitting at the intersection of two disparate fields which are rapidly hurtling towards each other. More than ever, it’s becoming important to publicise you and your research, whether you’re in academia or in the private sector. Sooner or later, this is likely going to mean you’re going to requiring some...

Outreach

I passionately believe that communicating research is a key responsibility of every researcher. A regularly do outreach talks and interviews about and around my own research. I also play a role in some longer term outreach projects. Chirp I currently lead an international collaboration developing Chirp, an app for the web, iOS and Android that...

What I’ve Been Listening To – August 2016

Phew! It’s been a scorcher of a month. Along with that, it’s been busy for me. Throughout August the astrophysics group at the University of Exeter have been preparing to host an international conference, and I’ve been doing little bits and pieces on the Local Organising Committee. Despite the this, I’ve still managed to get...

Beginning with BibTeX – Making Referencing in LaTex as Easy as Pi

[mathjax] It’s no secret that physicists love using LaTeX to write papers. This has many practical advantages, such as the ability to completely unlink your content from the formatting, very flexible layout tools and a veritable smorgasbord of packages to do everything from change the colour of your text to allow you to programmatically create plots...

Dr Sam Morrell Researcher in Light Pollution and Astrophysics University of Exeter I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, in Devon, UK. I was trained as an astrophysicist, and my astrophysical research interest spans studies of young clusters, stellar evolution, and exoplanet science. In my current position, I am bringing my expertise as...

Using Wintersmith to Make Awesome Static Websites

For the last month or so, I’ve been deeply investing my spare time into writing a website for a conference, the UK Exoplanet Community Meeting 2016, or UKEXOM 2016 for short. Early on we decided that the best way to host it would probably be to use Amazon’s pretty nifty S3 service. This comes with...

Tackling Internal Server Errors When Using Jade-PHP

I’m currently taking a break from the glitz and glamour of astrophysics and instead am working on various development projects I promised I’d do for people. My main experience with web development in the past couple years has been using the excellent combo of Node.js + Express + Jade + Stylus. This combo is great...

Rainbow in a Box

Yesterday, I helped out at the physics department with a visit for a local sixth form. The basic idea was that in the morning the groups of students got a tour around the building and then in the afternoon they would get involved in a load of experiments. I was assigned the job of looking after...

University is Over… for Now

It is a momentous day for me and rest of the remaining class of 2011 of the University of Exeter’s physics department. Today was our last ever results day. It was also the day where I found out, to my eternal delight, that the last 4 years have yielded a masters degree in physics; an...

About Me OLD

I'm a postgraduate astrophysicist working in the astrophysics group at the University of Exeter. My PhD project, under the supervision of Professor Tim Naylor, involves studies of planet forming stars. In this project we hope to be able to observationally study the mechanisms of planet formation around young stars in an attempt to validate current theory. I also...