I first became interested in astronomy in 1985 with the impending return of Halley's Comet, the famous comet which orbits the Sun every 76 years. Although Halley didn't appear very bright in the skies above Scotland on this occasion, compared to say Comet Hale-Bopp recently, spending time out looking at the stars and trying to find Comet Halley sparked my interest in astronomy. Just at this time I was applying to go to Glasgow University and I noticed that they taught astronomy. I had applied to study Mathematics and Physics but quickly became much more interested in the astronomy classes I was taking and so ended up graduating in Astronomy and Maths.
What research do you do now??
I stayed in Glasgow to study for my PhD in solar physics studying the solar sunspot cycle - which Andrew and I have tried to explain to you in these pages. Andrew and I worked on methods with which to try and predict the Sun's behaviour, using neural networks. These are computer programs which try to simulate how the human brain works. You can try your own brain against our artificial computer generated one in the Predicting the Sunspot Number page.
With the launch of SOHO in December 1995, I moved shortly afterwards to the University of Oxford and now spend most of my time analysing the Sun's transition region - the bit where the temperature suddenly shoots up quickly to the one million degrees found in the corona. By using SOHO to study the structure of the Sun's Transition Region, we can try and understand how the corona is heated.
Breaking my jaw while attending a conference in Boulder, Colorado in 1994! Not that I had a fight with one of my colleagues, I hasten to add, but I did manage to come off second best in a disagreement with the pavement. Still, a lot more scientists at the meeting got to know my name through that incident than would probably have read about my work, and so it wasn't such a bad career move!
I have several sports and hobbies that I try
and keep up an active interest in, such as golf, snooker, tennis and squash.
I also enjoy walking in the Scottish hills, although moving to Oxford certainly
hasn't helped me in that respect. I enjoy travel and carrying out research
in such an international subject as solar physics has certainly helped me
travel, funding several trips to different parts of the USA as well as Germany,
Norway, Sweden, France and Greece.
As you will have read, most of my colleagues on these pages also travel a lot and so we quite often get to meet up in different locations around the world, where we have great fun, while working hard of course.