About Me

I’m driven by a desire to improve myself and combine my experience and skills in interesting, novel and effective ways. As a co-founder of High Impact Engineers I’m working to help other engineers increase the social impact they have with their careers.

In my spare time, I enjoy tinkering with electronics and IoT-type applications, woodworking, Stoic philosophy, hiking, running and cycling.

I also occasionally post on these platforms:

PhD in Aerospace Engineering

I completed a PhD in aerospace engineering with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. My research was an experimental investigation in fluid mechanics, looking at the effect of surface roughness on wake flows. My thesis describes a comprehensive set of experiments to characterise the effect of surface roughness on the wake of submerged objects. It presents a statistical analysis of the results and a novel data reconstruction method to reveal how surface roughness affects the flow over the object and the organised fluid structures in its wake.

My PhD allowed me to develop a broad spectrum of skills across experimental design, programming, data analysis, research, writing and communication. I designed and commissioned a 3-meter-long system to suspend roughened plates in a water tunnel, designed and tested a high-speed high-energy laser shutter, and designed laser optic systems. I used Python heavily to create programs to process images, manage data workflows, clean and format data, perform Spectral Proper Orthogonal Decomposition, and prepare figures and visualisations of my data for publication. My data analysis focused on the statistical analysis of over 1 million fluid velocity fields, which was the cornerstone of the results I presented. I also picked up a bunch of other useful meta-skills along the way which have helped improve my time management, mental health, productivity, and more!