Profile

I live in Northamptonshire with my husband, who works in London.  Normally, he catches the train south every day and I travel north to Leicester. Devon is my real home though – I lived there most of my life and I do miss the hills, the moors and walking the coastal path. Whenever I visit, I always go walking in the countryside. Dartmoor is one of my favourite places to go, it’s beautifully wild and quiet.

When I want a bit more noise, I enjoy rock/metal gigs and I play a bit of piano. I sing (badly!) in the community Gospel Choir, which is a lot of fun too. I am a Christian too and enjoy a good science-faith discussion.

I work to understand how stars and planets for and I am particularly interested in how we can use telescope observations to learn more about what’s going on.

A lot of my work is setting up and running computer models which simulate how gas moves under gravity, for example to collapse to form a star, how electromagnetic radiation travels through gas and how abundances of various chemicals change in different conditions. I figured out how to link up the output of one code to a chemistry code and then how to use that to calculate how it would look with a radio telescope. The main programming language I use is Fortran. Fortran is great for scientific programming as it runs fast and programs can be designed to run efficiently on large supercomputers. I have run programs on supercomputers in Exeter, Cambridge and Leicester.

I am a theoretical, rather than an observational, astronomer. However I have used data from telescopes such as Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the Very Large Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and Herschel Space Observatory .