Guest Speaker Talk - A Career in Academia

Alistair McShee has a Masters in Physics with Particle Physics from Royal Holloway, University of London. During his studies he completed a SEPnet placement at the UK Atomic Energy Authority which led to a position on the UKAEA graduate scheme. His work included helping them to achieve the world-record fusion energy results on the JET tokamak. After four years in fusion, Alistair took his passion for science and business interaction in a new direction joining the University of Westminster as a Knowledge Exchange Manager, acting as a liaison between academia and connections outside the university to enable funding and broader research.

Dr. Bray is a Lecturer in Quantum Technologies and the Co-Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Quantum Communication and Quantum Computation at University College London (UCL). They hold a prominent position in advancing both theoretical, experimental and non-technical curriculum for the centre. After completing their undergraduate degree at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), Abbie pursued doctoral research that solidified their expertise in quantum technologies through attosecond physics. Abbie completed her PhD at UCL and her Lectureship started in January 2022 as they were writing up thesis. They were told the Lectureship role would be perfect, so applied with little hope in getting it, but my experience in teaching and quantum won the day.

Abbie has won numerous teaching and public speaking prizes and was formerly a SEPnet student who did a placement at RAL in High Energy Physics.

Dr Phil Wiseman is an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Southampton, where he was previously a post-doc for 7 years. Before that, he completed a PhD in astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics near Munich, Germany, after gaining an MPhys in physics from Durham University. He works on the most energetic explosions in the universe, when stars end their lives or are torn apart by black holes. Accomplishments that led to the award of his Fellowship included the discovery of the most energetic astrophysical event ever witnessed, thought to be some form of star or gas cloud being destroyed by a supermassive black hole, as well as detailed simulations of the links between the brightness of supernova explosions and the types of galaxy they explode in. Phil has worked in many international collaborations and is now particularly involved in the effort to begin data analysis from two new revolutionary telescopes, the Vera Rubin Observatory and the 4-metre Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope.

Dr Joshi is a Research Fellow in ultracold atomic physics at the University of Sussex, specialising in quantum gas magnetometry. After completing her BSc in Physics, she joined the Quantum Systems and Devices group at Sussex as a PhD student, where she developed the Bose-Einstein condensate microscope (BECM) to image magnetic fields produced by a carbon-nanotube network and reconstruct their current pathways. Her experimental results formed part of a key publication that underpinned a successful EPSRC grant application. This funding supported her first postdoctoral position, in which she is advancing the BECM technique to study current-density networks in bio-samples and nanoscale electronics.