Teaching

Disclaimer: I no longer teach at UCL, but I’m very proud of the years when I did, and of the brilliant people I worked with. Below is a short summary of my experience.

Ph.D. students

To date, I’ve supervised three amazing Ph.D. (“graduate”) students who I will enthuse about at length if asked. You can learn more about Tom Pollard (at MIT), Jack Carlyle (formerly at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, and at ESA) and Steph Yardley (at St Andrew’s University) by clicking on their names.

Interns

I also had the pleasure of working with Krishna Mooroogen (now at the National Physical Laboratory) who received his Ph.D. under the tutelage of Rick Morton at the University of Northumbria’s Solar Physics group.

Taught courses

Postgraduate

I led the Group Project for UCL’s MSc in Space Science & Engineering, from 2010 to 2015. The Group Project is a bit like The Apprentice for budding space scientists & engineers, because we give them 6 weeks to design a satellite to a particular mission brief. This could be to monitor earthquakes across the world, to study an asteroid beyond Neptune, or to peer at the event horizon of a super-massive black hole. At the end of the project, they are assessed in a final design review by academic and industry experts, and many of them go on to positions in the space industry.

Undergraduate & Postgraduate

From 2013 to 2016, I also lectured in UCL’s Masters-level Solar Physics course (PHASM314), which has had some amazing lecturers teach it for decades. It was hard to walk in the footsteps of Sarah Matthews (my colleague on the course), Lidia van Driel-Gesztelyi (a wonderful mentor), Ken Phillips (my Ph.D. advisor), Len Culhane (my former boss) and many others. But it’s a fun course to teach, and I always hoped we’d leave all our students with a better physical understanding of, and sense of wonder at, the star that gives us all life.

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