Simulated Universes

The third year astrophysics course at the University of Queensland has students use data from a simulated universe to build a distance ladder and speed through the progression of 20th century astrophysics. After I took the course as a student, I built my own simulated universe program from scratch in Python (a typical galaxy from the sim is the picture on the right!). We now use my program in the 3rd year course and it's great seeing students interact with it each semester!

You can take a look at the code for the simulation on the project Github repository, which also has some (pretty lacking for now, still WIP) documentation and tutorials on the project pages site. We simulate a lot of real physics: stellar populations, Universe expansion/contraction, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and many more! The parameters of each simulation (e.g. the Hubble constant, galaxy populations, stellar variability) can be randomised so that different groups of students can investigate entirely different universes!

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Unhealthy Bread Obsession

I was a little late to the sourdough party from COVID, but I feel like I've gone deeper down the sourdough rabbit hole than most. Whenever I'm working from home, I always have a loaf proofing in the kitchen behind me and it's become something of an unhealthy obsession. I promise I'm not trying to sell it to you but there's truly a lot of comfort in a freshly baked loaf of bread that you've made -- I'd encourage everyone to give it a try! Shoot me an email if you're curious about how to get started.



My (very short) Art Career

Part way through my physics bachelors, I took a couple of years off to pursue a career in photorealistic landscape painting. You can take a look at my work here. I originally learnt from the free Bob Ross "The Joy of Painting" videos on YouTube and built my style from there. Each photorealistic painting is a very long process (usually taking anywhere from 40-80 hours per small painting!) and it was great to get into the zone. Unfortunately the art world is overwhelmingly competitive (and so I switched to academia *heh*) and solitary painting wasn't the most lively past time. Astrophysics is much more my speed!

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