Job:	PhD at The Queen's University of Belfast and at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
Born:	Dublin, 1973

Schooling

I went to school in Dublin where I studied English, Irish, French, mathematics, chemistry, and technical drawing - I only started studying physics at university.

University

I took a degree in experimental physics and mathematics at University College Dublin which was a great place to study and an even better place to party! I then went to The Queen's University of Belfast to do an M.Sc. in Opto-electronics and ended up spending 4 months in the Canary Islands doing my thesis. Life can sometimes be very cruel.

What do you do?

I've spent the last 2 years looking at how the solar atmosphere changes with height and also at how small bright points or 'blinkers' evolve using the SOHO satellite. The best part of my work has been helping to build an eclipse experiment which our team took to the Caribbean to observe the 1998 eclipse. For the 1999 eclipse we hope to go to south western Europe or even to the middle east. That's one great thing about being an astronomer, you get to travel all over the world as part of your job!

Got any hobbies?? Unfortunately I've got my head in the clouds for this answer too. I've been a member of the Queen's University parachute club (http://quis.qub.ac.uk/pchute/ homepage.html) since the beginning of 1998. I currently 'only' jump from 3,500 feet but will hopefully qualify to do free-falls in the near future. That means I'll be jumping from nearly 10,000 feet! I also play electric guitar and 5-a-side soccer with the other astronomers in Queens every week - though not all at the same time!

	Person you'd most like to meet Jimmy Hendrix. Who else?

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