I am a instrumentation architect and solver-of-problems, with a passion for applications to the human body. Although the IT world seems to have taken over the job market for titles involving systems engineering, I would described myself as being a practitioner of the older definition of this field - deconvoling complex problems into simpler, managable systems with well-defined communication between them, then design those base systems in parallel.
Since 2003, my work has involved creating a novel medical imaging system for my doctorate, then moving to California in 2007 to join the BioAutomation group at Life Technologies (formerly Applied BioSystems); designing robotic systems for the Biotech industry. The focus of that work was creating manufacturing systems for the purpose of producing oligo nucleotides
2003-2007 I was a PhD student with the Department of Medical Physics at University College London (UCL). I'll leave a note here to remind me to write a page describing what I did, but the title of my PhD is "Advances in Optical Tomography Instrumentation". The BORL group website should satisfy most questions about the imaging system I'm improving, MONSTIR.
Apart from my research, I been creating websites on and off for about 15 years, using SQL, Perl, Java, VB and, more recently, PHP. This is the first personal site I've put effort into, but I've been a part of a few commercial / charity sites. Note: I am very much a web-coder, not a designer. The style for this site was nicked and simplified from BrightCorner.
I've also worked in technical theatrics, mainly with the ADC theatre in Cambridge during my undergraduate degree in Natural Science (Physics). I've been chief electrician for an American tour of Hamlet, and the lighting designer and technical director with two European Shakespeare tours (Winter's Tale and Midsummer Night's Dream) with the European Theatre Group (ETG).
A special mention has to go to the musical I was a part of during 2000/01 - Hamlet The Musical was just as silly as it sounds, but has a fantastic score (names to come), and was tremendously good fun to watch. None of the cast, production team, sound designer (Matt Scarsbrick), or I could never have forseen that a written-at-the-last-second musical, first created in protest to an awful production of Jason and the Argonauts, would sell out almost immediately, and continue doing so throughout an entire Endinburgh run. Stunning.
The show has since been back to Edinburgh in the summer of 2010, amongst other successes, and is still rockin' it for Denmark - Hamlet!