Profile

I live in London with my partner with too many computers and nowhere near enough books.

I like beer, aniseed balls, curry, red wine, computers and cats. I dislike cucumber, sprouts and millipedes.

I’ve worked as a barman, an accountant, a bank clerk, a double glazing salesman, a road sweeper, an embedded systems developer, a network installer, I got a PhD blowing things up with lasers and now I get to X-Ray things.

I have zero musical skills despite owning at least 10 CDs and having thousands of MP3s on my computers. I sometimes write. I often take photos. I collect books.

I cook excellent bacon rolls, pretty good Thai fish curry, decent roast lamb and appalling cakes.

CT scanners are machines that produce a 3D x-ray image. They are often used in medical diagnostics and in industrial use. The scanners I build are for research in medicine and dentistry. Our scanners are the best in the world for contrast – this means they are slow, but you get the best images possible – we can use them to see very tiny changes in the structure of teeth and bones.

A tooth imaged by my scanner – you can see the dark grey patches around the filling (in the middle) – this is further decay. The owner of this tooth didn’t take care of it

But, when you have an x-ray machine in your office everything is fair game to scan!

This is an acorn with wasps developing inside it. These acorns (or Oak Galls) used to be used to make ink in the middle ages, you can still make ink from them today – I teach people how to.

As well as teeth and bones, I often work with old documents that can’t be opened – we can see the ink they are written with using our scanners.

An old document that can’t be fully unrolled without tearing it. This document dates back to the time of Henry the 7th.

Using our scanners we can see the ink in the rolled up item and then do a virtual unrolling in a computer so we can read what was hidden. We’ve not found any hidden treasure maps yet, but I’m still hopeful!

A “virtually unrolled” parchment document

This is all proper work – but when you have an X-Ray system at your fingertips you get a bit creative about how you use it.

It started when I brought an apple in from home for lunch, as I was about to eat it I spotted a hole. Having the CT scanner tight behind me, I took an image to see if I was about to get a less than tasty mouthful of maggot.

An X-Ray of an apple. No maggot seen!

I posted the image to social media to see if anyone could guess what it was. There was quite a lot of interest, so I began to post x-ray images of my lunch daily. This become themed and over the Christmas Advent period and Easter I began posting picture of festive items and various chocolate eggs.

Of course, the one day I brought in another apple for lunch and forgot to CT scan it, the inevitable happened.

Apple with maggot poo – just after I’d taken a bite

The kettle goes on as soon as I get to the lab. Then the computer.

The most important equipment in the lab!

Check and reply to email while drinking the first Tea. I will then usually meet with whoever is scanning samples today – we’ll check the samples are correct and then figure out the scan parameters.

The samples are usually teeth from the dental school. We have lots of PhD and Masters students doing research projects. Often they will want to check how good a tooth is to start with before the use it in their research.

If we see something like this when we scan the tooth, we know it is too decayed for the students to use in their research. About 50% of this tooth has rotted away!

A bad tooth

I’m building a new scanner at the moment, so there is a lot of programming needed for that. I spend several hours per day on this at the moment.

Some code I’m currently working on

The new scanner is almost twice the size of the older one we use. To get it in the room we had to knock down the wall and rebuild it behind the scanner.

MuCAT 2 – the older scanner

MuCAT -3 The new scanner

In the afternoons I usually spend at least one hour helping students with their data analysis – basically looking over the images from our scanners and helping them identify what they are seeing.

I’m always learning – so I’ll also be reading books and articles in my subject published by other scientists.

It’s surprising how quickly the day goes when you’re busy.

On Wednesdays I teach science to students training to become book and paper conservators. They generally all have a background in arts and need to learn about adhesives, inks, pigments, paper, parchment, dyes, microscopes, analysis techniques, etc. It’s good fun – we get to do a lot of interesting testing in the lab. A few weeks ago we made ink from Oak Apples (the acorns with wasps) and also with tree bark and some Tea.

Ink made with oak apples, Tea and bark.