Biography
I started watching The Sky at Night while still at school.
I was incredibly fortunate and went to a school blessed not only with a large telescope, but with teachers brave or foolhardy enough to give the keys to my friends and me. Access to such a large telescope fuelled my love for the subject, and sent me to Magdalene College Cambridge for a degree in Natural Sciences, followed by a PhD in the chemistry of star formation at University College London.
Around the time I began my PhD I was recruited to The Sky at Night team, first as a researcher and then increasingly as a reporter and co-presenter. These days my day job is as a researcher at the University of Oxford where my research involves recruiting as many people as possible to help out with astronomical tasks like discovering supernovae or classifying galaxies (see the links below).
A highlight of every month, though, is the trip to film the programme and talk about comets, cosmology or whatever is happening in the sky.
