Profile

I study quasars, which are extremely bright galaxies powered by supermassive black holes ✨🔭.
As an astronomer, I get to travel the world visiting telescopes and collaborating with other black hole physicists ✈️.

I studied Maths and Physics at Warwick University where I did a masters project in exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our sun 🪐.
I did a PhD in quasars at Durham University, exploring how quasars may be an important link in the evolution of galaxies.
I am now at Newcastle University as a postdoc (full time researcher) where I am part of international astronomy collaborations.

At the centre of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole, which are extremely massive black holes (~billions times the mass of our sun!! See right image). Black holes are incredibly dense objects that have such intense gravity that not even light can escape (which is why they are called black!).
In some galaxies, the material surrounding and falling into this supermassive black hole is so hot and so bright, that it outshines the entire galaxy. The brightest of these galaxies are called quasars (see image below), which are what I study. Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe!

In my work I use different wavelengths of light to explore quasars and whether they could be important in the evolution of galaxies. In particular, I am interested in dusty quasars which appear much more red than typical quasars (which look very blue).

I spend most of my days writing code to plot graphs using data from various telescopes.
I code in Python, which is the coding language that the majority of astronomers use.
I use radio data and analyse light at different wavelengths (called “spectroscopy”).