Profile

My name is Euan and I moved to Bristol two years ago with my girlfriend Fola (now fiancée!). When I’m not working or doing science I love to watch rugby, which I used to play when I was younger. I also host a student radio show with a few friends, which runs every Monday at 6pm. The show is called “Soul Train” and is an hour of music from the soul, funk and disco genres.

I’m currently doing a PhD in Bristol, which means I’m studying for a qualification you can get after you’ve complete your university degree. The qualification is based around doing research on a particular subject. My research is based on different things that we can do with light and with particles of light called photons. What I am particularly interested in is whether we can build a computer using light, and not just any old computer, but a special type called a quantum computer. This crazy device is a computer that is based on the weird world of quantum mechanics, and we want to try to build one because it can do some things better than the computers we use at the moment. We hope this will useful for a whole range of problems in the world.

The first thing I usually do when I get in, is go and make a cup of tea whilst I answer all the emails I got from the day before. I then spend the morning reading about other research that people are doing before then going into the lab. In the lab I spend lots of time aligning optics, which involves moving mirrors and things to make sure the light is going in the right place (and not in my eyes). After lunch, I then spend the afternoon either in the lab, in meetings with my supervisor, or at my PC doing simulations to see if the next part of my experiment will work. I also sometimes spend some time teaching people about physics and doing talks and presentations.