Fellow Detail

I am a scientific developer interested in software development, computational materials and plasma physics simulation for nuclear applications. I'm particularly interested in nuclear fusion and Gen IV fission reactor designs.

I am passionate about adapting practice and approaches from commercial software design into a research context. I am also keen on STEM outreach and public engagement.

I am a member of the Scientific Computing Department at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. We collaborate with a number of scientific communities across the Harwell campus and provide high performance computing infrastructure and services.

My work has spanned a variety of domains and technologies including a placement with the STFC Cloud service where I developed an Openstack preproduction instance. I also spent time with the Computational Engineering Group modelling the behaviour of hypothetical nuclear reactors. Novel nuclear plant designs are difficult to test experimentally due to high cost and safety considerations, instead computational methods are used to simulate their performance. My collaborator and I studied molten chloride reactors, an approach in which uranium is melted into a molten salt which acts as both fuel and coolant. In addition to using pre-existing simulation packages we developed our own Python tools. There was no easy way to publish these tools alongside our research and this is part of my motivation in becoming an SSI fellow.

Currently I am contributing to the development of a data management service for the Diamond Light Source and the ISIS Muon and Neutron Source. I'm excited to be using and learning about modern software development frameworks and tools and I'd like to advocate their uptake throughout the research community.