Profile

I’ve lived in Bristol most of my adult life but my research has taken me all across the world to talk at conferences and do research with other people. Although during the day I’m very technical in my spare time I love the arts, playing guitar and taking part in theatre shows.

I work on new techniques on both ultrasonic manipulation and levitation. Though we have known how to levitate things with sound for a long time, recently we’ve been able to combine other technologies such as more powerful computers, 3D printers and even car parking sensors to do much more exciting and varied things.

A large part of what I do is running simulations of my ideas to see if they could work. If these look good then I have to try them out on experiments. As well as running my experiments I often have to build the equipment to run them too, which can be a lot of work!

I built the device which first levitated a non-spherical object stably.

I also worked on building the world’s largest acoustic tractor beam for the BBC, which you can see here if you want https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDyJkFehDk0&t=520s

I’ve also collaborated with other research groups from around the world. In the simplest sense this involves sending emails and exchanging tips and tricks, but I also spent a month in Stuttgart, Germany working with another group on combining out expertise. That was where I discovered that my German is nowhere near as good as I thought it was.

Another big part of what I do is communicating our work, through scientific conferences. We design new techniques in levitation and manipulation but they’re not very helpful if nobody uses them! So, I go and give presentations to share our ideas and talk to other researchers. I’ve been all across Europe with this, from Pisa up to Helsinki and then even further afield to San Diego in the USA.