Research Talks

Included here are a selection of my upcoming and recent research talks. 12th October 2018 – Gaia DR2 Specialist Discussion Meeting at the RAS I had the privilege of being included in the talks for the specialist discussion meeting sharing the scientific insights gleaned from Gaia DR2. At this meeting I presented a talk about...

We Discovered an FUor

We discovered a very rare kind of star – in fact there are only 25 stars of its type known to exist. The fact that we found it is amazing, but the way we found it was even more interesting. We caught it red handed during an FUor outburst – a period of intense flaring...

About Me

I am an astrophysicist, currently working in the astrophysics group at the University of Exeter. Under the supervision of Professor Tim Naylor, my PhD project involves understanding the evolution and characteristics of M-dwarfs. By harnessing the power of the second data release of the Gaia mission, we have been able to develop methodology for measuring...

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...

STFC Summer School 2015

And so it has become time for my first trip as (nearly) a postgraduate. Several train journeys, and a lot of paper reading, later I ended up in the beautiful city of Cardiff for the STFC Summer School in Astronomy. This is essentially a conference for new STFC funded postgraduates in astronomy and space science to come...

My Research

My research interests span a wide variety of topics. My masters research focussed on studies of extinction and interstellar dust. Throughout my PhD, my work focussed on observational studies of the evolution of stellar clusters, low-mass stars and characterisation of exoplanet host stars. These studies have made extensive use of cutting edge observational data from...

Chirp – An App for Monitoring Gravitational Wave Alerts

I’m absolutely delighted to announce that a spare-time project I have been involved with for the best part of a year has finally been released. Enter Chirp – an app to help you monitor gravitational wave alerts. The app is being officially released to coincide with the start of O3b, the second part of the...

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...

Once Again, With More Soul

In my free time of late, I’ve been busy beavering away on my latest website. This one has taken a few weeks to perfect and hone but this is the brand new website for my band Soul Traders. This has been coming for a little while, and when you see the old site you’ll understand why. It’s...

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...

An Undergrad Primer on Vectors