Profile

My work is a big part of my life but I think everyone should have some things that they do for fun.

So I play lots of badminton, I am currently a member of the Loughborough Badminton Club and Leicestershire Master County Team, where I play mixed and ladies doubles.

I was lucky enough to be volunteer at the London 2012 Olympics and the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth games where I worked with badminton players on the practice venues and organising practice sessions. I met so many of the players I have been watching for years, and of course got loads of autographs, pins and photos.

I also love watching tennis live and travels to the different tournaments collecting autographs and photos with the tennis stars. I have a vast collection which include top players like Serena Williams, Sir Andy Murray and Roger Federer to name a few. I still need to go the Australian and the French Opens to complete the Grand Slam tournaments, they are on my to do list.

Another passion of mine is photography and I hope that one day I will be able to take amazing landscape photos, I am building my skills every day.

An example of how I support the integration of technology in teaching is the development of our award winning PV remote lab. Where students studying one of our distance learning module get to control  an equipment based at Loughborough from anywhere they are in the world through the internet 24/7. Through a web cam the students can see the physical apparatus of the experiment. Students can set and measure irradiance levels from an LED light source, control the temperature of the PV panels, change the PV panels on a turntable, and take IV curve and download their data to write the report.

I am also a warden for one of Loughborough halls of residence, where I provide pastoral care for 320 freshers and returning students. In this job I get to help students get settled into university life and it is great to see them develop into young adults over the period they are at Uni.

I also volunteer as a STEM ambassador, as I have a great passion to inspire the next generation of engineers. We have been running a very popular solar car activity since 2004, since then we have had more than 5000 people build our car and last year our 2000th car was made.

My typical day is not that interesting. However, I have some crazy busy days when I have things to sort out for my main role, a STEM outreach event and activities in halls.

So on these days I would  have to for example do a demo of the remote lab, I might need to fix it if there is a problem and explain to others how they could develop something similar.

Then I would have an outreach activity for a couple of hours where we have 30 or more school kids visiting and we go through the solar car activity with them. We usually see some wacky designs and get some amazing cars built.

Then in the evening I need to attend an event in hall like our High Tables or Quiz night.

Currently, when we run our solar car activity we give prizes for the fastest car these can sometimes be quite random. However, most time the students would prefer to take home the little solar car they have made, this is not possible as they usually create this in a group and we reuse the material. So having a stock of solar gadgets and solar panels which we could use as prizes and to also  give to all participants so that they can continue to explore the concepts they learnt in the session would be great.