Profile
Hamish Cavaye
-
About Me:
I love computer games and board games as well as cooking, brewing my own beer, and using one of my three telescopes to take photos of planets and galaxies.
-
Read more
I live just south of Oxford with my wife and my daughter. I love playing PC games and have built my own computers since I was 15. I also enjoy having big groups of friends over to play “serious” board games that last for hours, as well as playing Magic the Gathering and Warhammer. I love food and cooking, my favourite food is Indian – the spicier the better! My favourite movie of all time is The Matrix and my favourite book is House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, which is incredible science fiction!
When I’m not playing games, I sometimes go outside with my telescopes and take photos of things in space. Below is a photo of the sun I took with the international space station crossing its face.
-
My pronouns are:
He/Him
-
My Work:
I used to design pyrotechnics and special effects, and have worked with explosives. Now I bounce neutrons off all sorts of different samples to understand more about where the atoms are and how they are moving.
-
Read more
The ISIS neutron and muon source is a national facility based on a large research campus just south of Oxford. We have a proton synchrotron, which is a circular particle accelerator (like a mini CERN!) which accelerates protons to 84% of the speed of light before smashing them into a brick of tungsten metal, which causes a bright flash of neutrons. Everything happens so quickly, it does this 50 times per second. We can then use these neutrons to investigate all kinds of different materials.
Interior views of ISIS
My job involves helping visiting scientists to prepare their samples and put them in our neutron beam as well as making my own samples and doing my own experiments. People come from all over the world to use our facility and they research almost anything you can think of, from new drugs, to solar energy and batteries, as well as materials for hydrogen storage or new alloys for engineering.
-
My Typical Day:
My typical day involves a mixture of working in a chemistry lab, working in the big neutron experimental hall, and analysing my results on a computer. I usually work from 9-5, but sometimes an experiment needs 24 hour attention, and so I will have to come back late at night and at the weekend or even sometimes stay over in the experiment hall.
-
Read more
I wake up around 8, a little later than some people because I prefer to stay up later, and head in to work.
If I am doing a neutron experiment that day I will go to the experiment hall and either meet some new visiting scientists to help them prepare a sample to measure or prepare my own sample, which usually involves putting the sample in a special aluminium container. I’ll then insert the sample into a special refrigerator that cools it down VERY cold, only around 5 degrees above absolute zero, and then switch on the neutron beam and start counting neutrons. I might change samples two or three times per day, which sometimes means I have to come back late at night because the neutron beam runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
On days where I am not running a neutron experiment I spend most of the time in my office. Here I have a computer that I use to analyse the results of my experiments and to help our visitors to analyse their results. We then write these results up as reports and scientific journal articles, which (if we’re lucky) get published for anyone in the world to read.
-
Education:
- 1990 – 1994 Linslade Lower School.
- 1994 – 1998 Linslade Middle School.
- 1998 – 2003 Cedars Upper School & Community College.
- 2003 – 2007 University of Oxford.
- 2008 – 2011 University of Queensland (Australia).
-
Qualifications:
- I did 11 GCSEs when I was 16, including maths, science, English, history, business studies, and IT.
- A Levels: Maths, Further Maths, Chemistry. AS Levels: Computing, General Studies.
- I got a first class MChem degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and then went on to study for my PhD at the university of Queensland. My PhD involved making sensors that could detect explosives.
-
Work History:
- 2012 – 2015 – Research and Development of pyrotechnics and special effects for Le Maitre Ltd. I was part of a small team that developed and tested new pyrotechnics for use in stage shows and on TV. We made special effects for big names like Guns N Roses, The Killers, Katie Perry, etc.
- 2015 – 2017 – Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Cranfield University, Centre for Defence Chemistry. My job here was working with polymers that can be used to make explosives safer to handle.
-
Current Job:
Since January 2018 I have worked as a Research Fellow at ISIS. My job is partly funded by the company Johnson Matthey, and so I spend some of my time meeting with scientists from JM and helping them use neutrons to advance their research. The other part of my job is to use the neutron instruments for my own research, as well as helping our visiting users to perform their experiments on our equipment.
-
My Interview
-
How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Big Bald Beardy
What did you want to be after you left school?
A rocket scientist
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Very rarely! I didn't like getting told off...
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
Either professional beer brewer or possibly a software developer
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Tool are probably my favourite band
What's your favourite food?
Eggs! Any kind, as long as they are cooked well.
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
To be healthy, to not need to sleep (there's not enough time in the day!!), and maybe something big like stopping climate change
Tell us a joke.
What did the cheese say when it looked in the mirror? Halloumi!
-