Work and Research

Radiotherapy

I enjoy working on problems at the intersection of computing, physics and patient care. My work as a radiotherapy physicist provides me the opportunity to do just this.

I am involved across all areas of the radiotherapy physics service including imaging, IT, dosimetry, QA, treatment planning and brachytherapy. However, my role has two main aspects:

  • Assisting in routine service provision by providing scientific expertise, performing QA and carrying out other clinical work
  • Completing projects, audits and research. This work encompasses areas such as introducing new techniques, clinical audit and scientific analyses.

Personal highlights from my work in Radiotherapy include working on treatment setup errors, calculating dose distributions from Tomotherapy treatment plans and investigating the difference between Dose to water/Dose to medium.


Astronomy

My Ph.D focused on testing the standard model of the universe by studying the largest scale structure (LSS) in the universe and the primordial radiation left after the Big Bang (CMB).

One half of my studies was testing whether a proposed galaxy underdensity in the southern galactic cap (‘the Local Hole’) is real - and if so how far it extends & whether it is consistent with our picture of how the local region of the universe is moving. The broader significance of this work is that it relates to how typical (or special) our portion of the Universe is.

The rest of my Ph.D involved using the first public data release from Planck which described foreground contamination of the CMB , i.e. data on radio sources and SZ clusters. In particular I used this data to test whether it was mutually consistent with other CMB data from the WMAP satellite. Again, the broader significance of this work was that it investigated possible systematic errors in data which underpinned the standard model of the Universe.