Sep 2023 – Jun 2024 · 9 mos · Nottingham, England, United Kingdom · On-site

• Managing, maintaining and acquiring equipment and labratory equipment for first year physics teaching labs and other smaller responsibilities.
• Assisting research groups with providing, preparing and giving advice with regards to all manner of equipment issues.
• Administrative tasks including attendance monitoring, purchasing and organising and running outreach activities.
• Risk assessment, safety management and supervision of students.

Oct 2018 – Sep 2023 · 4 yrs 11 mos

• My research aimed to develop new characterisation techniques for thin film antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials, primarily utilising spintronic and magnetooptical techniques to detect AFM anisotropy. The following thesis abstract has been contracted to fit here:
• AFMs, with their rise in prominence and the discovery of new effects, have led to growing interest in antiferromagnetic spintronics. Since AFMs have little or no stray fields and very low magnetic susceptibility, one of the biggest challenges faced by the field of AFM spintronics is the difficulty to manipulate and measure the magnetic structure of these systems. Most techniques capable of unambiguous detection of magnetic changes or domain structure require large facilities, and so the aim of the contained thesis was to support the development of new benchtop techniques capable of making such observations in AFMs.
• The extents of spin flop were confirmed using magnetic neutron diffraction and showed that up to 98 % of moments reorient at 8 T. Neutron diffraction was shown to be capable of detecting magnetic changes in films as thin as 20 nm.
• Asynchronous optical sampling was used to develop a rapid technique capable
• of characterising CuMnAs films grown on GaAs(001) and GaP(001) substrates. This utilised the changes in the Voigt effect to measure the difference in polarisation of light during and after a heating pump pulse partially demagnetises a CuMnAs film. Spin flop was detected using these same changes.
• ASOPS was also used to measure some of the elastic constants of CuMnAs using strain pulse echo detection and elasticity equations.
• A room temperature vacuum system was designed, manufactured and used in electrical switching experiments, providing an oxygen free space at and near room temperatures which allowed for higher current pulse amplitudes that possible without.
• The room temperature system was used to try and detect Néel spin orbit torques which lead to the discovery of new, unexplained, signals.

Oct 2018 – Dec 2022 · 4 yrs 2 mos

• Demonstrating in workshops for the Scientific Computing module available to third year Physics and Astronomy undergraduate students. The module taught the skills necessary to convert physics problems into models that can be simulated using code. The course suggested the used of Python or MATLAB but the module did not teach programming explicitly, and instead was aiming to work on the modelling aspects. The role of the demonstrator was to assist students with the physics problem solving and to help explain the way of thinking necessary for writing code.

Jul 2017 – Sep 2017 · 2 mos · Nottingham, England, United Kingdom · On-site

• This research internship was part of a collaboration between the the soft condensed matter group at the University of Nottingham and the R&D department at Adidas America, Portland, OR, USA. The aim of the project was to measure contact forces using FTIR, and lead to published work (Optical Measurement of Contact Forces Using Frustrated Total Internal Reflection by Sharp et al.). The research required some basic chemistry such as handling and mixing of silicone, toxic dyes and chlorinated solvents. Spectroscopy, electronics and the skills necessary to make a load bearing platform were all necessary as well.

Jan 2016 – Aug 2018 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Nottingham · On-site

• Renovation, roofing and extensions. Working holidays and weekends during undergraduate studies.

Mar 2012 – Sep 2015 · 3 yrs 6 mos · East Grinstead, England, United Kingdom · On-site