Work

Detectors, then satellites, then telescopes, then lasers.

1. 2025 – present

   Foundational

   Co-founder & CTO

   Satellite laser ranging and space situational awareness. Ground stations, and the software that turns returned photons into orbits.

2. 2020 – 2025

   Lumi Space

   Lead Engineer, then COO

   Built the engineering behind a commercial satellite laser ranging service: ground-station optics, lightweight retroreflectors, turbulence monitoring, pass prediction. Contributor to ESA's ALASCA optical feeder-link demonstrator.

3. 2020 – 2024

   University of Oxford

   DPhil, Astrophysics

   Instrumentation for HARMONI, the first-light spectrograph on ESO's Extremely Large Telescope. An automated test bench for its 42 volume phase holographic gratings, and cryogenic alignment of its collimator mirrors.

4. 2016 – 2020

   Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL)

   Optical Payload Systems Engineer

   Payload chain lead on a 100 kg Earth-observation satellite. Designed, built and tested 1 m-resolution cameras. Data analysis for EarthCARE's multispectral imager. R&D on deployable optics.

   Lab work video →

5. 2015 – 2016

   European Space Agency, ESTEC

   Young Graduate Trainee

   Characterised large-format infrared detectors for future ESA astronomy missions.

6. 2011

   RAL Space, STFC

   Research placement

   Redesigned the Band 5 local oscillator for the ALMA radio telescope, and visited the Atacama site while it was under construction.

7. Education

   MSc Space Science & Engineering (UCL, 2015) · BSc Physics with Astronomy (Cardiff, 2013)