Meet the scientists!

I teach at a university (Glamorgan), but I also do a lot of work in schools – I run something called the Faulkes Telescope Project (based at Cardiff University), and I am the UK’s National Schools’ Astronomer (an ancient title, which I invented in 2000 for a grant proposal…). FT is fun, as we control two large (2-metre) telescopes over the Internet – they are located in Hawaii and Australia, so we can do astronomy without all that staying-up-all-night nonsense. Just log in from anywhere with an Internet connection, and you can control a £5 million telescope for 30 minutes – not bad, for free…a lot of my time is spent working on educational projects these days, trying to find interesting ways to teach STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects – I think using space as a “hook” is a great way to get people involved in all types of science.

My kids think I spend all day on e-mail – which is only partially true… I do use e-mail a lot, to try and co-ordinate projects, keep in touch with the people I work with, chase up people who I need things from, and generally try to organise the chaos that is my “normal working day”. When I’m teaching, I’ll have a block of two 2 hour lectures for a few days each week, but during the rest of the year (we teach for about 24 weeks/year at uni) I’ll be busy trying to raise money for various educational projects that I run. I say “I run”, but in fact I spend a lot of time making sure other people are able to work on these projects – I’d like to spend more time actually doing stuff, but someone has to manage things, and I guess right now that’s me. I do get to spend a day or so each week working in schools though, which is great fun (especially primary schools!).

I don’t get to do too much actual science these days, but I have PhD students who do that stuff – I just get to pay all the bills…

In the evenings, I’m either taxi-ing Ben (15) or Cerys (13) to something/where, or going to the gym – I teach martial arts at a club up in the Valleys. After watching Ben do judo for the last ~5 years, I’ve just started training with his club – it’s absolutely knackering, but great fun – getting to squash/choke/crush your teenage son is very under-rated as a hobby…50kgs of extra mass can still overcome 5 years of training!

I guess my science career has moved on from the “doing science” bit, so that nowadays I’m more into the “managing other people so that they can do science while I raise the funds and make sure everything keeps working smoothly (most of the time)”. I love teaching, and try to make sure that my 1 day a week that I have to work on my STFC fellowship is spent in schools whenever possible. I get as much of a thrill working with infants on simple stuff like the Earth-Moon-Sun system and day-and-night, as with 6th formers on the lifecycle of a star. I really find this stuff fun, and I hope that I can convince school students that there really is some great science out there to get stuck into, whether it’s biology, chemistry, physics or some new bit of science we haven’t even got a name for yet…

Science in school can be really boring, so I like to take in some fun stuff to make it more exciting – so I’d use most of the money to buy stuff like air and water rockets (the sort that can reach 200m height) and fossilised dinosaur poo (coprolites – the most cool/gross stuff you can take into a primary school!). Whatever was left I’d use to buy a nice curry, or a Chinese…