Profile

I grew up on a small cow farm in rural Ireland before I went to university in Belfast, also spending a semester abroad in Germany where I did a lot of hiking in the Alps! I moved over to England a year and a half ago when I got this job in Oxford and am really enjoying it so far. The people I work with are great and I’ve definitely made a lot of friends here that I do a lot of activities with like hiking, climbing, having dinner, going quizzing, and playing D&D with.

I design and develop robots and strategies to help maintain Nuclear Fusion Reactors where it would be too dangerous for humans to go into. It’s also a dangerous place for robots so we work to make them tougher so they can do their jobs properly. My office is really cool because it looks like just a regular office on one side of the building but the other half is a big workhall where all our testing robots live. We also have out big reactor on site that’s called JET and we send our robot called MASCOT inside it where it fixes the inside wall for us. The way MASCOT is controlled is like a puppet where the operator moves a copy of the robots arms exactly the way he wants them to move on the robot.

I travel with my flatmates to work, as they both also work at my company as an electrical engineer and a physicist. We travel by train as there is a train station only a short walk away from our site, but we always have to hope that the weather is good! Thankfully I also have the option to work remotely as much of the work I do can be done from my laptop. This work largely involves researching and studying robotic systems for remote maintenance, then analysing these systems to determine their suitability for the desired requirements and discussing it with my colleagues in office and other engineers and physicists across the globe. I sometimes have to use maths so solve problems, or use computer programs to model robot shapes and performances. After work I usually like to go for a run if the weather is good, hang out with friends, play games, watch movies, whatever takes me in the moment really!