Profile

I enjoy trying out different things, and have worked in different industries (business, academia and industry) as well as on different topics (physics, medical scanning technology, materials science). I’ve also invented, patented and tried to commercialise a steering system for robotic vehicles.

I’m current at Shell, where I run computer simulations to try and produce 3D images of the Earth. We can look up to 10km under the ground using only sound recordings and a way to put the sound energy into the ground.

I’m keen to show how a solid knowledge of STEM can provide many opportunities to work on many varied and fun things, as well as provide opportunities to travel around the world whilst doing so.

My job is to take sound recordings of vibrations in the Earth, and turn them into a 3D image. This is so interesting layers in the Earth can be identified, which are likely to contain Oil.

Once these oil deposits have been identified, they can then be extracted. After some purification, separation and blending, the oil is used for a whole load of things, from the fuel in your parent’s cars to plastics – even road tarmac is made from oil!

To make the recordings, you need a way to put a vibration into the earth, which could be a stick of dynamite on land, or if on the sea they use something called an airgun. The vibrations then travel down into the earth, which looks like layers of a cake. At each layer interface, some of the sound is reflected back. Special microphones, called geophones, pick up these reflected sound waves, and these are used to make the 3D image.