Profile

I grew up in Cork near the sea but surrounded by fields. Growing up I loved rowing in the sea, cycling, and playing tennis. I love brainstorming and solving problems and that’s why I decided to study Engineering when I finished school.

The energy we use every day for transport, for heating and for electricity has to come from cleaner sources. The way we do it now using fuels that produce carbon dioxide and other green house gases (gases that turn the earth’s atmosphere into a greenhouse) is part of the problem causing global warming. We need to stop the rate at which the world is warming to prevent harmful climate change where we have droughts, flooding and less land for people and animals and trees to live on.  My work looks at electricity or power systems. It looks at how we can still have electricity for all the things we want to do like cooking, playing computer games, and so on but doing it with more renewables and reducing the use and eventually stop using fossil fuels. I’m really interested in the next few years until the year 2030 as what we can make happen in the next few years could make all the difference to saving our planet.

I build models of the power systems in Europe on my computer using some very smart computer software and I put in limits to make sure that the power system model reflects the limits of a real power system. Once the model is built I use it to explore a lot of “what if” questions – like what if people use less electricity?  what if we build lots and lots of wind and solar farms (farms that produce power from the wind and sun)? What if the weather changes from the way it has normally been? What if everyone owned an electric car? And so on. By answering these questions I can figure out what things need to happen for different situations or if there are somethings that we can do that will help no matter what?

Building electrical circuits can be done really cheaply with a few bits and pieces like batteries, a peg board, some wire, a bulb etc but it can be really fiddly. For kids trying to build a circuit for the first time, it can be really disappointing if it doesn’t work because of a loose connection and results in frustration.  There are kits available that click together almost like lego that can make it much easier to build circuits and learn more about electricity and I’d like to buy some of these for my outreach activities.