Profile

I love the outdoors, hiking in the mountains, swimming in the sea and looking at the night sky through my telescope and trying to take photos of it. I have also taken up archery recently. I enjoy reading fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings, Game of Throne, the Mistborn Trilogy and my favourite author is Robin Hobb.

Fusion is the process that takes place in the heart of stars and provides the power that drives the universe. I work on trying to help make that happen on the Earth so we have a cleaner energy source.

To produce energy from fusion here on Earth, a combination of hydrogen gases – deuterium and tritium – are heated to very high temperatures (over 100 million degrees Celsius). The gas becomes a plasma and the nuclei combine to form a helium nucleus and a neutron, with a tiny fraction of the mass converted into ‘fusion’ energy. A plasma with millions of these reactions every second can provide a huge amount of energy from very small amounts of fuel.

One way to control the intensely hot plasma is to use powerful magnets. The most advanced device for this is the ‘tokamak’, a Russian word for a ring-shaped magnetic chamber.

Some days I work in the control room of the JET tokamak where we do experiments on how to control the plasma in the device. Most of my time is spent analysing the data from these experiments and trying to use Machine Learning techniques (which is where computers learn from data how to do something without being programmed to do it) to allow the computers to control the fusion device at much faster speeds than a human can.